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Comment by sixothree | Hacker News Reader

It may have been true during the days of CRTs. I have had a lot of pets and don't remember any of them showing interest in the televisions whatsoever, other than a source of warmth. And that is definitely no longer true.

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I had a dog growing up that insisted on watching The Price Is Right every weekday morning and she'd bark at you until you changed the channel. Then she'd push a stool in front of the TV, sit on it, and watch Bob Barker for an hour and when the show was over she'd get up and leave.

Something about a dog liking to watch someone whose last name is Barker makes this a great story!

I worked for a TV production company, and we made a show called Kitten TV, in which each episode was 45 minutes of kittens playing in different custom built themed playsets.

On Instagram we received hundreds of pics submitted by viewers of their cats watching Kitten TV, it became a meme.

The observable non-reaction was true, what was not true was the cause, which is the low frame rate.

This is the problem with this kind of thing so often, people observe something and an explanation that sounds completely logical gets spread around.

I remember a friend's cat following the mouse pointer on an Amiga with a CRT monitor. When moved off the bottom of the screen, the cat would go right up to the screen and try to peer down to see where it had gone.

Not sure about dogs, but cats definitely could see a plain 60Hz CRT display... atleast some of them anyway.

Sure but a cat would probably have the same reaction if an arrow behaved like that irl, it's not the same as recognizing something as a living being due to how it moves.

It may be that at least part of the story was that some animals had issues purely with CRT technologies. A shift from shooting electrons through a window, to source pixels of very specific frequencies, may have been better.

For example, this spectral comparison implies there is a rather large difference in the color experience of watching CRT vs LCD. Very pronounced and spikey red component vs smooth gaussians. Canines are notorious for issues with red colors.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alireza-Shahsafi/public...

My border collie dog was definitely interested by any sheep appearing on my old CRT.

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