Study: What Do Dogs Like to Watch on TV?
86% of owners indicated that their dogs watched television
Finding good television shows to watch these days can be “ruff” if you are a dog. After all, most shows are geared towards a decidedly different demographic: humans. Nevertheless, a vast majority of dogs out there still seem to be quite screen-captivated quite often. A survey found that 86% of dog owners felt that their dogs paid attention to what was being shown on TV, as described by a recent publication in Applied Animal Behaviour Science. And take a wild guess as to what on TV seemed to be most enjoyable for dogs to watch. Here’s a hint. It ain’t humans.
Yes, TV executives. If you want to capture more of that important two-to-seven-dog-year demographic, you might want to put more dogs in your programming. The survey administered by a research team from the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine (L.K. Donohue, M. Buesing, K.D. Peterson, C. Ersoz, L.J. Russell, and F.M. Mowat) revealed that dogs seemed most attracted to TV screens when guess what appeared? Dogs.
Doggone it, animals in general were by far the most interesting subject for dogs, with 95% of dogs paying attention when some kind of animal appeared. And of these 95%, the vast majority (93%) seemed interested when fellow canines made cameos on TV.
The second most popular animal subject for dogs was wild animals, which attracted attention from 65% of the dogs who showed interest in animals. In this case, wild animals didn’t mean humans behaving badly on reality TV shows. Instead, it meant animals who were living out in nature versus domesticated ones serving as pets. Perhaps, many dogs are intrigued by what their lives could have been sort of like how some people working in the corporate world may wonder what their lives would have been like had they chosen to buy that cabin to live naked in the woods instead.
The purr-fect answer for third place among animals of interest would be cats, which garnered attention from 64% of the dogs who seemed interested in some kind of animal. That was followed by livestock at 64%, horses at 63%, and squirrels at 56%. Amongst the various live TV subjects, humans fell a distant ninth with only 37% of dogs expressing interest. Sorry, humans. Apparently, you aren’t nearly as interesting as squirrels. Maybe you aren’t such good friends of dogs after all.
Keep in mind, though, that dogs weren’t the ones who actually responded to the digital survey that was administered from March 2022 through March 2023. No, the respondents were instead 1246 human dog owners. It’s not clear how many of the dogs may end up saying, “Frank, who claimed to be my owner, did not speak for me.” But for now, let’s assume that the owners were pretty good at assessing when their dogs were interested in what was on TV. The owners assessed their dogs’ interest based on behaviors such as turning their heads to the side, pricking up their ears, approaching the TV screen, barking, and touching the screen with their noses. Note that these were all behaviors of their dogs and not the human owners themselves. Typically humans don’t express interest in a TV show by touching their noses to the screen.
Now, animals weren’t the only things that seemed to captivate dogs. Over a quarter (28%) showed interest in sports, ball sports specifically. Yeah, looks like dogs really like balls—the kinds used in sports, that is. The most popular ball sports for dogs seemed to be football (meaning what the U.S. calls soccer and the rest of the world calls football) and basketball. American football came in third followed by tennis.
Of course, just because your dog is watching and reacting to something on TV doesn’t necessarily mean that your dog approves of it. Without knowing dog language, you can’t really tell if your dog is saying, “This is awful, why does my owner watch this dribble”, “This rom-com plot is so formulaic”, “The answer to that Wheel of Fortune puzzle is not ‘Fish Love’”, or “Who the bleep would want to be part of a reality TV show.”
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