Horse Trail Chicks

Greetings, predators! Yes, you with your forward facing eyes with your binocular vision and your sharp canine teeth and all of that. Even though these days most of us go shopping at the grocery store rather than chasing down prey, we are still predators.

To state the obvious, horses… are not. They are 1,000 pound prey animals with a strong flight instinct, which we ride around on. Quite literally, they see the world differently. I often try to think about how a horse sees the world as I am working on training or trying to understand why a horse is behaving in a particular way.

Horses have a very wide field of view, much wider than our predator’s binocular vision. Binocular is a word derived from Latin with bini meaning “two together” and oculus meaning “eye”. Much of this field of view is made up of monocular vision (with mono meaning “one”) where they are viewing something with just one eye. Since they are prey animals, this wide field of vision helps them keep watch for any approaching predators (or terrifying plastic bags).

Source: thinklikeahorse.org

Horses see almost 360 degrees with the exception of right in front of them and behind them. When they see to either the left and right side of their bodies, they are using their monocular vision. In front of them, with the exception of a blind spot, they have binocular vision. Binocular vision, like we humans have, requires an overlapping field of view. This binocular vision helps with depth perception. Of a horse’s field of view, about 65 degrees is binocular vision with the remainder is monocular vision. This is a fairly complicated subject, so I won’t get into all of the details here. However, I think there are a few interesting take-home points that relate to understanding horse behavior.

Have you ever seen a horse who saw something strange lift his head up high and stare at it? Or noticed that when horses are jumping they often lift their heads as they are approaching the jump? This behavior allows the horse to focus its binocular vision on the object or jump, which improves their depth perception. Basically, they can see it better and understand how far away it is more accurately when they do this.

What are this!? – Prophet lifts head head high to get a good look at the scary tarp jump.

Have you ever seen a horse jumping weird scary jumps with their head tucked between their front legs or investigating something close to them on the ground like water, a weird branch, or even a dog or cat with their head lowered? They will lower their heads to look down their nose at it to get a clearer view of the object, again employing their binocular vision.

What are this!? – Prophet lowers his head to look at the scary tarp jump as he’s going over it to make sure it doesn’t eat him.

Understanding that when my horse is raising or lowering his head, it’s to look at something clearer allowed me to understand my horse a little better. I make sure to let him have a good look with his handy binocular vision, and this has actually helped him not to spook at objects because he can see them and better understand what they are.

Prophet looks down his nose at this turtle friend to make sure he really is a friend.

There are a few other topics I want to touch on where horse vision impacts horse behavior.

Have you ever had a horse hesitate when going from a bright area to a dim one? Maybe you are leading a horse into a dark barn or entering a forested area on a trail ride. Horses, unlike people, may need a several minutes for their eyes to adjust to a dramatic change in light (up to 15 minutes!). Us humans can make this adjustment in a few seconds. This helps to explain why horses don’t want to go into a dark area and often stop when being asked to do so – they can’t see! Sometimes even giving them a few seconds of adjustment can be the difference between “Oh my gawd that monster is going to eat me!” to “oh, a weirdly shaped log.”

Once their eyes are adjusted, horses have better vision than we do at night. You may have read one of our earlier blog posts about night riding. If I wasn’t sure before that ride, it was pretty clear that Prophet could see far better than I could during our night rides. Often I couldn’t even tell where the trail went, but he kept right on trucking without tripping or hesitating.

Horses are not colorblind, but they do see color differently from people. They can see blue and green particularly well, but have trouble with red. I often noticed that certain horses will spook at blue barrels, but have no problem with the red ones that are the exact same size and shape. I once rode a horse who absolutely refused to jump a jump with blue barrels under it, but soared over the one with the rust colored barrels. I don’t know about where you live, but around here people often have these large blue recycling bins out on trash day. A horse that I used to ride quite a bit would always shy at these, but wouldn’t care about the black trash bins.

A better understanding of how horses see the world has definitely helped me understand my horse a little better. Now when Prophet pulls his head to the ground to look at the puddle, I know that he’s just getting a better look at it and trying to understand what he’s seeing. This doesn’t mean, of course, that he won’t feel the need to also splash everyone in the group by pawing at it with gusto… but hey – he probably just figures we could all use a little cool down during a long trail ride!

A couple of sources that I consulted while writing this:

https://www.horsewyse.com.au/howhorsessee.html

https://www.equisearch.com/articles/horse-vision-and-eyesight

Happy trails!

Kerrie