Snoot boops and bunny hops,

Winston & Bella x

Why your corgi can't find the red ball in the grass 🎾

Research from Jay Neitz's Color Vision Lab at the University of Washington confirms dogs see color, just not the way we do. Dogs are dichromats — they see blue and yellow clearly, but red and green both read as murky brown or gray.

So, that bright red ball you keep losing in the grass isn't hiding from your corgi. It's camouflaged: green lawn and red rubber land in roughly the same part of a dog's color range.

Corgis were bred to work outdoors, chasing and retrieving at speed — good eyesight matters for the job.

Swap red and orange toys for blue or yellow ones and you'll likely see faster, more confident retrieves, not a "stubborn" dog who can't find the ball!

What "corgi" actually means in Welsh 📏

"Corgi" isn't just a cute name. It comes straight from Welsh: cor, meaning dwarf, plus ci, meaning dog. Put together, the "c" in ci softens to a "g" (a normal Welsh sound-shift called mutation), giving you "corgi" — dwarf dog. Someone was calling this breed "the short one" centuries before "short king" was a compliment 😆

There's also a correct Welsh plural, and it isn't "corgis." It's corgwn, said roughly "KOR-gun," built from cŵn, the Welsh word for dogs — the same ancient root that gave Latin canis and English "hound." English speakers ditched it for "corgis" generations ago, but next time someone asks what you call two or more, you've got the right answer!

We recommend...

A hands-free launcher for the corgi who wants fifty fetches before breakfast (incidentally this isn't Winston 😅... he hates fetch!!), made even more useful by this week's science: it comes with the classic yellow tennis ball, one of the two colors your corgi can actually see clearly against grass.

Corgi of the day

Here's Kip, channelling his inner Brigitte Bardot! Characteristically corgi, he is "absolutely indomitable whether hiking the woods or playing with the big dogs, but voguing seems to be his inner super power," says his owner, Miriam 🤭