Can Sunglasses Affect Your Dog during the competition?
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Your dog is looking at you. But can it still read you when it can't see your eyes?
You've probably heard the warning:
“Don't wear sunglasses in the ring. Your dog needs to see your eyes.”
It sounds convincing.
Dogs watch us closely. They follow our movements. They respond to our attention. And in obedience especially, we often actively train eye contact.
But is wearing sunglasses actually a problem?
And could hiding your eyes change the way your dog responds to you?
Let's look at what the science says.
Can sunglasses get you disqualified?
Not automatically under the FCI rules. The current FCI obedience regulations do not specifically list sunglasses as a prohibited item. They do, however, give judges authority to disqualify a handler who does not follow the rules or behaves in an inappropriate manner.
The FCI maintains separate regulations for agility as well. So the statement “sunglasses mean disqualification” is too broad. But perhaps the more interesting question is not whether sunglasses are legal.
It's whether they change what your dog sees.
Your dog really does look at your eyes
This part isn't a myth. Researchers have used eye-tracking technology to investigate exactly where dogs look when they see human faces. And the result was striking:
“looked most to the eye region”
— Kis et al. (2017)
In that study, dogs differentiated between different parts of human faces and showed a preference for looking at the eye region. So when your dog is standing in front of you during obedience, or checking in with you on an agility course, the eyes are not irrelevant. Your dog is actually looking at them.
What does your dog learn from your eyes?
This is where it gets more complicated.
Dogs don't simply look at our eyes because they're interested in eyes. They use visual information to determine where our attention is directed. In one classic experiment, researchers varied whether people were facing the dog and whether their eyes were visible. The dogs were able to use several sources of information:
“the orientation of the body, the orientation of the head and the visibility of the eyes”
— Gácsi et al. (2004)
And when the eyes were covered, the dogs showed more hesitation in some situations and preferred to beg from a person whose eyes were visible. That's important. It doesn't prove that dogs need to see our eyes. But it does show that eye visibility can be meaningful information to a dog.
So what happens when we put on sunglasses?
Your dog can still see:
- your face;
- your head position;
- your body;
- your movement;
- your hands;
- your shoulders;
- hear your voice.
But your eyes are partly hidden. And we already know that dogs pay attention to the eye region. So could sunglasses change the information your dog receives?
Yes, it is biologically plausible.
But here's the important part: We don't yet have evidence that sunglasses make competition dogs perform worse.
That distinction matters. We have research showing that dogs use human gaze and visual attention. We have research showing that dogs notice whether human eyes are visible. But that doesn't automatically mean:
sunglasses - poorer agility or obedience performance.
That specific question has not been adequately tested.
Training changes the picture
Research on 145 Border Collies found that training influenced how dogs responded to human gaze. Dogs with extensive training spent more time looking at the human's face, while training specifically for eye contact also changed their gaze-following behaviour.
In other words:
“Training decreased dogs' gaze following and increased gaze to the human face.”
— Wallis et al. (2015)
Think about what that means for an obedience or agility dog. We spend hundreds of hours teaching our dogs to watch us. We teach them that our body, movement, position and sometimes our eyes predict what happens next.
Legal doesn't mean irrelevant
Even if sunglasses are permitted, your dog may still notice them. Dogs are excellent at detecting changes in familiar patterns. A new jacket, hat, hairstyle—or sunglasses—changes the visual picture of the handler. That doesn't mean the dog will perform worse. It simply means that appearance is part of the environment your dog has learned to work in.
And that gives us a very simple training rule: Don't introduce something new in the ring that you've never trained with at home. If you want to compete in sunglasses, train in them. Then take them off. Then put them back on. See whether anything actually changes.
The verdict
MYTH: “Sunglasses automatically disqualify you.”
Not supported as a blanket FCI rule.
FACT: Dogs pay attention to human eyes.
Eye-tracking research supports this.
FACT: Dogs can use whether human eyes are visible when assessing human attention.
Experimental research has demonstrated this.
UNKNOWN: Do sunglasses actually reduce performance in agility or obedience?
We don't have enough direct evidence to say. And perhaps that's the most interesting part. The statement “your dog needs to see your eyes” contains some truth—but it turns a sophisticated communication system into a simple rule. Your dog isn't reading only your eyes. It's reading you.
So before you tell another competitor:
“You can't wear sunglasses. Your dog needs to see your eyes.”
perhaps ask two questions:
Where does the rule say that?
And:
What does the research say?
Because those are two very different things.
References
Gácsi, M., Miklósi, Á., Varga, O., Topál, J., & Csányi, V. (2004). Are readers of our face readers of our minds? Dogs (Canis familiaris) show situation-dependent recognition of human's attention. Animal Cognition, 7(3), 144–153. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-003-0205-8
Kis, A., Hernádi, A., Miklósi, B., Kanizsár, O., & Topál, J. (2017). The way dogs (Canis familiaris) look at human emotional faces is modulated by oxytocin: An eye-tracking study. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 11, 210. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2017.00210
Virányi, Z., Topál, J., Gácsi, M., Miklósi, Á., & Csányi, V. (2004). Dogs respond appropriately to cues of humans' attentional focus. Behavioural Processes, 66(2), 161–172. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2004.01.012
Wallis, L. J., Range, F., Müller, C. A., Serisier, S., Huber, L., & Virányi, Z. (2015). Training for eye contact modulates gaze following in dogs. Animal Behaviour, 106, 27–35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2015.04.020
Fédération Cynologique Internationale. (2025). Rules and guidelines for obedience trials for classes 1, 2 & 3. FCI.
Fédération Cynologique Internationale. (n.d.). Agility. FCI.