What is your favorite color?

While statistics show that the world’s favorite color is blue, it turns out that this isn’t something that is universal across species.

In fact, according to a study recently published in the journal Animal Cognition, dogs show a strong preference in terms of color.

And their choice may surprise you.

It might seem like favorite colors is a frivolous, human-centric phenomenon, but research has long proven that there are distinct preferences in color when it comes to the animal world. Think of the ostentatious feathers of a mating bird for example: amongst many species, male birds have adapted to have bright plumage in order to attract a mate.

It’s no coincidence that male birds get their shiny and vibrant new feathers at the beginning of mating season; the more impressive and colorful the display, the more likely a female bird will select him as her mate, ensuring that these vibrant colors are passed down to their descendants.

The idea of color preference sparked the idea for researchers in India to try to determine how dogs respond to color.

And in their experiment, involving 485 dogs living in the street in Kolkata, the results were decisive.

The dogs were presented with three bowls of food. The three bowls were differently colored, in blue, yellow, and gray, in like with dogs’ dichromatic color vision which means that they can differentiate between yellow and blue.

Sometimes the bowls all contained the same amount of food, while sometimes the bowls were all empty.

And regardless of these factors, the dogs showed a high preference for the yellow bowl.

Subsequent tests showed that the dogs had no preference between the blue and gray bowls – even in the first experiment these two were chosen less than a quarter of the time by the dogs.

Such was the dogs’ love for the yellow bowl that even when the researchers added extra treats to the gray bowl, they still headed straight for the yellow one.

The researchers have several theories as to why the dogs preferred the yellow bowl – including the way it stands out in their dichromatic vision from its surroundings, or, more likely, the association with scavenged food, as the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Kolkata’s Anindita Bhadra explained to New Scientist:

“I have a feeling that this preference got heightened with dogs’ co-evolution with humans, especially in India, where we use a lot of spices in our food and all the garbage they’re scavenging is loaded with turmeric. Looking for yellow might have an ecological advantage for them.”

Or, without any other evidence to the contrary, perhaps dogs just really love the color yellow.

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