occasional
Well-known member
I have taken the question from another thread - can cats and dogs see through glass ?
My cats certainly can!
That looks fairly clear.
Would anyone care to add further species ?
I would suggest that hooded crows can see through, whereas pine martens cannot.
David FG,
I suspect that it is a lot more complicated than you suggest and needs to be defined almost down to species level.
Glass is not necessarily transparent to UV light, and so being able to see through glass is a function of how sensitive (or insensitive) the eyes are to UV light, and apparently there is evidence that some birds see UV light.
I , for example, have seen no evidence that foxes can see through my windows.
O (simplyfying matters as if UV were a single frequency)
They certainly do however appreciate the glass is there and understand it is a barrier - I have a Crested Tit that feeds at my feeder on the kitchen window. It will happily feed eve if I am just 5 cm from the glass (outside it generally lets me get only about a metre away), but if the cat sits in the same position, the bird moves in much more cautiously.
[Because I can sit three feet from a fox and wave at it without eliciting any reaction.
Which might be true if birds or anything else could see ONLY UV light. As it is they can also see much the same range of light as us PLUS some we can't.
I suspect that this analysis is incorrect. If glass is not transparent to UV light then to an animal that is sensitive to UV light the glass is likely to appear to that animal as a solid object of UV colour.
Why must it be at species level? If a whole range of species have what is essentially the same structure, it is a very reasonable assumption that it works in the same way. The vertebrate eye has a common origin, after all. Domestic dogs can most certainly see through glass, so why would not foxes, wolves and other canids? Domestic cats can, so why wouldn't other cats? I don't believe there is anything different in any significant way between the eyes of species in these groups.
Because I can sit three feet from a fox and wave at it without eliciting any reaction - as long as I am behind a window. And we appear to have established that dogs can see through windows.
It could of course be a function of the glass in the window.