麻豆淫院

A team of animal behaviorists at the Indian Institute of Science Education & Research in India has found that street dogs living in that country prefer eating from yellow bowls to those of other colors. Their paper is in the journal Animal Cognition.

Prior research has shown that dogs have just two types of cone photoreceptors in their eyes compared to the three in humans. This means that they don't see colors the same way. Dogs see the difference between blue and yellow, for example, but other colors such as green, orange and red appear to them as muted shades of gray or yellow. This means that for dogs, the color yellow stands out.

In this new effort, the research team wondered if the prominence of yellow in dog photoreception made the color more important to dogs. To find out, they carried out experiments on free-range dogs living in rural, semi-urban and urban areas in or near the city of Kolkata in India. The team coaxed 458 of the dogs to take part in experiments involving choosing between colored bowls.

In India, free-range street dogs are common鈥攖hey survive through the generosity of people feeding them, generally from a bowl of some type. Thus, they are accustomed to being presented with bowls, which they expect will be filled with food.

In the first experiment, involving 134 dogs, each was given a single chance to choose one of three food-filled bowls placed a short distance apart on the ground as the researchers watched and recorded their choices. They found that 72 of the dogs chose the yellow bowl. They repeated the experiment with empty bowls and found much the same result.

In the second experiment, the researchers gave the dogs a choice between an empty yellow bowl and food-filled gray bowls. Most of the dogs still went for the yellow bowl, 41 out of 52 times. The team repeated the experiment with even more desirable food, and found the results much the same.

In the third and final experiment, the researchers covered the bowls to prevent the dogs from being able to tell their color and found they then picked randomly, ruling out the possibility of the dogs choosing the yellow bowls in earlier experiments due to scent.

The research team suggests there are potential explanations for the dogs' preference for yellow, such as the ecological valence theory and species-confidence hypothesis, but they acknowledge that these do not fully explain the observed behavior. The authors suggest that further research is needed to understand the ecological advantages or reasons behind this preference.

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