A different view

WHEN your horse spooks at that bush that has been there every time you have walked past it for the past year, you might wonder whether they are seeing ghosts or just being silly. After all, nothing has changed about the bush in your eyes. But what we see and what horses see are not necessarily the same thing, and an understanding of equine vision can be very helpful, especially when training young horses, designing jumping courses or managing horses with vision problems.

Horses are prey animals and their vision is specially adapted to allow them to identify and therefore avoid predators approaching from any angle, rather than for the identification of stationary objects.

The horse eye is among the largest of any land mammal; the globe is situated on the side of the head and is very mobile, and the resultant field of vision is enormous – horses have an almost 360° field of view with only a few blind spots (which are