Bluey has been a popular show for a while now. Kids love it, parents love it — and apparently, so do dogs. If your dog loves watching the show, there may just be some valid reasons behind it. Amanda Farah, National Training & Behavior Coordinator for Best Friends Animal Society, told People in an interview that there are many reasons why the show has become known as “dog entertainment.”
In her position, Amanda has researched dogs and how they interact with video. So when it came to breaking down why dogs are infatuated with Bluey, she provided some valuable insight.
The first reason Amanda gave is that the show uses colors dogs can see. Though "we can't get inside a dog's brain and know" which colors they can see, there is some evidence to suggest they see blue and yellow, she said. Bluey has a heavy blue and yellow color palette. “They can discriminate blue and yellow,” she explained. “Maybe they don't see blue as the blue we see it or yellow as the yellow we see it, but they can tell the differences between those.”
The second reason Amanda provided was that the show features constant movement. “We know in studies [that have been done] that lot of dogs will just tune out completely from the video if there's not movement involved,” she said. “When I watch Bluey, all I see is the movement. It's high-contrast movement, so the lines are sharp and crisp, which probably helps because dog's visual acuity is not as sharp as ours.”
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The third reason is that the show uses predictable patterns. This something that the dogs love and find soothing, Amanda says. “There's a really interesting study that dogs learn to detect patterns in videos. So if two people are throwing a frisbee back and forth, the dog will anticipate that the frisbee is going to the recipient. So anytime that there's a repeated motion, that would be another thing that dogs would tune into. If they could predict the way that a motion is going to happen, they really like that.”
Reason No. 4 is that the show has high-pitched sounds. “There's a lot of research that shows that dogs are more apt to tune in to high-pitched voices,” Amanda said.
For the fifth reason, Amanda theorized that the Australian accents in the show could pique the dog's interest. “I think it's just because they don't recognize it and it's not a cadence that they're as familiar with. I don't know if they're not picking out words that they would normally pick out or something like that, but it definitely could play a part in that dogs are drawn to novelty. Sometimes they want to investigate the novel things.”
The sixth reason Amanda gave for why dogs love Bluey is that it keeps their attention for a short period of time due to their seven to nine minute episodes. “When we're doing training with [dogs], I'm typically recommending that people's training sessions [are] not more than a couple minutes,” she explained. “We know that dogs seem to forget things that have happened if it's [been] more than three or four minutes,” Farah continues — and the constant motion of Bluey's animation may grab them a bit longer than that.
As for the final reason and possibly most obvious reason, dogs seem to love Bluey because the show features dogs. "There is research that says that dogs seem to discriminate dogs on video," Amanda said. "They recognize dog shapes, which is probably not surprising."
Many people have shared videos on YouTube and social media of them testing out to see how their dogs enjoy the show.
"The fact that they made Bluey in the colors that dogs can see is adorable," one person said, while another person added, "The people who made Bluey are actually so pure for that, it’s so adorable ."
