Is this color blue?

Yes. We’ve tuned our colour TVs and computer monitors for the three types of colour receptors in human eyes. Dogs, like most mammals outside the primate group, only have two types of colour receptors, so the colours on TV don’t look right to them. (Contrary to a popular myth, dogs are not colour-blind.)

On another tangent, Stephen Jay Gould turned out many wonderful essays on our species’ obsession with trying to split things into distinct categories, like alive/dead, plant/animal, and fish/amphibian/reptile/bird/mammal and how evolution consistently managed to create things that confounded all our attempts to draw unambiguous borderlines. If he were still with us, he would have had fun with this one, what with colour being continuous and our names for colours being discrete.

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