Pets are pawing at screens to watch this South Korean cartoon. Experts explain the science behind it.

Dogs keep pawing at the TV during a specific Netflix cartoon… that wasn’t made for them. A South Korean cartoon about a colony of seals has turned into an unexpected hit with animals, and social media is full of videos of dogs standing inches from the screen, tilting their heads and batting at the glass. One Oregon woman told The Guardian that a clip of her two goldendoodles watching it pulled nearly 10 million views. “The minute the seals started drumming, Benny sat up, and Myrtle had these subtle head tilts,” she said. The show is Sealook, a wordless slapstick series co-produced by The Pinkfong Company and Million Volt. It premiered in South Korea in 2022 and later landed on Netflix, where it’s listed as a TV-Y kids’ comedy. It was made for children. “Seeing cats and now dogs as well, becoming so absorbed in Sealook has been a fun and unexpected surprise,” Leah Yeon, Pinkfong’s communications lead, told The Guardian. She said they didn’t set out to make a show for animals, but what they did make is pretty (and accidentally), perfect for one. Dogs and cats are dichromatic, meaning they see blues and yellows well but struggle to distinguish reds and greens. Sealook is pale ice, blue water, and brightly colored seals, so almost the entire color palette falls inside the range an animal can actually distinguish. Netflix noted in its own feature on the show that viewers started pointing this out in late summer, and that it’s a coincidence rather than a design choice. Then there’s the movement on the screen. “Cats and dogs are particularly interested in movement because they are instinctively drawn to chasing a mouse or other prey,” David Williams, an associate lecturer in veterinary ophthalmology at the University of Cambridge, told The Guardian. Freya Mowat, a veterinary ophthalmologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, put it more plainly to the paper: “Cartoons are great content for dogs: high contrast, lots of movement, nice fun music, it’s the whole package.” The sound may matter as much as the picture. Emily Blackwell, a companion-animal behavior specialist, told The Guardian that the noises the seals make could register as prey sounds or as squeaky toys. Williams suggested an easy at-home test: turn the sound off and see whether your dog stays interested. A 2024 study in Applied Animal Behaviour Science surveyed 1,246 dog owners and found that 86% said their dogs watched screens, with 90% of those owners citing movement as what grabbed the dog’s attention and 78% citing sound. However, that study is about dogs and screens in general, not this show—and it says nothing about cats. Nobody has actually tested Sealook on a representative sample of animals. But what does exist is a pile of videos of pets that do appear to be watching, and a reasonable enough theory about why. Of course, plenty of dogs don’t care at all. As one commenter put it: “I put this on for my dog, and she’s watching me instead.”