MORE than 1 in 10 New Zealand guide dogs for the blind might themselves be short-sighted. But the good news for owners is that it doesn’t seem to affect their performance.
Like humans with myopia, the dogs see distant objects as blurred because light from them focuses in front of the retina. “If the myopic dogs we identified were children, they’d be wearing spectacles,” says John Phillips, an optometrist at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Phillips and his colleague Andrew Collins presented their team’s results this week at a conference on myopia in Cambridge, UK. Of 61 guide dogs…
