Viewing like a horse

Vision is crucial to all species to help avoid threats and to navigate. As vision varies between species, this must be taken into account when creating sporting, training and housing environments – an issue that is particularly important when considering sport horses as the safety of both the horses and their riders is crucial.

The authors of this study aimed to compare the predicted visibility to horses of current fences and hurdles used in jump racing and to characterize horses’ response to their color and other factors including the weather and time of day.  In total, 11 different jumping parameters were measured.

The study showed that the visibility of fences is strongly influenced by their color because the color seemed to affect both the angle taken by the horse to jump and the distance they jumped. Surprisingly, colors that we tend to consider highly visible (eg orange) seemed to be less visible to horses than other colors including light blue, fluorescent yellow and white. Bright blue also seemed to be more visible and encourage them to employ a wider take off angle.

Another parameter to be considered is paint.  The study compared matt paint with gloss with matt fences seeming to offer a higher degree of contrast to the horses. Light conditions were also important with shade significantly reducing the level of contrast in most scenarios.

The results suggest that an optimal fence design could include highly fluorescent white for the takeoff board and fluorescent yellow for the mid-rail and hurdles. Taking this on board and incorporating additional parameters, including cognition, hormone levels, long-term learning and prior experience is important to improve horses’ welfare, safety (and performance).

S.C. Paul and M. Stevensl. Horse vision and obstacle visibility in horseracing. Applied Animal Behaviour Science 222 (2020) 104882. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2019. 104882.