Optical Options dishes out (pretend) prescriptions for all kinds of animals!

Many kinds of animals cannot see as well as humans do. While we do not recommend buying a pair of glasses for your cat Fluffy or your neighbor’s dog Fido, we can write up some hypothetical prescriptions for them. Let’s take a look and see what prescription certain animals would need to see as well as we do, shall we?

First off, we are going to measure using the standardized 20/20 scale. This signifies a comparison between what the person/animal in question would see at the same distance (the first 20) and what a normal person would see at the equivalent distance (the second 20, though this number can change). This means that 20/20 vision is normal for a human, but if someone had 20/40 vision it would only be half as good as a normal human, since the subject would see at 20 feet what a normal human could see from a distance of 40 feet. Conversely, someone with 20/10 vision has eyesight that is twice as good as a normal human.

Now for the animals!

First, let’s start with man’s best friend, the dog. The typical dog does not have the best eyesight, however. They can have eyesight between 20/50 and 20/100, meaning that at best a dog would have eyesight 2.5 times worse than the average human. They also are somewhat colorblind, perceiving the world around them similarly to humans with red-green colorblindness. They do have much better senses of hearing and smell compared to humans to make up for their lack of eyesight, however.

Next up are cats. The average domesticated house cat also has really poor vision, about 20/100. This leaves them with eyesight that is 5 times worse than the average human. They also have a very skewed sense of color, perceiving black as the color red and green as the color white. At the same time, they have incredibly good night vision due to how their eye is structured, which lends itself well to their nocturnal hunting habits.

Lastly, let’s take a look at the horse. Horses have much better eyesight than cats and dogs, but not as well as humans. The typical horse’s eyesight is 20/33, about 1.65 times worse than the average human. However, horses have a 350 degree field of view, compared to the typical human’s 180 degree field of view. Horses have the ability to see all around themselves due to the placement of their eyes on the sides of their heads, giving them much better visual awareness than humans.

While we here at Optical Options do not currently fill prescriptions for animals, we do for humans! There are many people that suffer from myopia (nearsightedness) and farsightedness (hyperopia) that could greatly increase their quality of life through glasses or contact lenses. If you think you need glasses, come by our office for an exam today!

Source: http://www.ehow.com/facts_6175753_human-compare-eyes-other-animals_.html