

Horse Vision - would bi-focals help?
A horse has one of the largest eyes in the animal kingdom—bigger even than an elephant. Its eyes have a huge range of vision (about 340 degrees out of 360), with only two small blind spots—the six feet directly in front of its nose and immediately to its rear as wide as its hips. For this reason, the safest way to come up to a horse is at a slight angle, looking for a cocked ear or an eye in your direction to indicate he knows you’re there. Otherwise, you may startle the horse and end up getting kicked.
Because the eyes of a horse are set on either side of its head, it does
not
normally see objects like we humans, with our binocular
vision, do. Most of the
time a horse sees a different picture with each eye. And
since a horse’s eye
muscles don’t easily bring objects into focus, it uses the
lower part of the eye to
see into the distance, and the upper part of the eye to see
things that are close
up.
When looking afar, a horse holds its head high. An interesting note is
that the
muscles that assist in this process also raise the ears and
prick them forward at
the same time. This is a nice feature if you are on the
lookout for predators.
When a horse wants to look at objects close up, the opposite occurs: it
lowers
its head and the ears relax.
Horses see fewer details than humans, but are much more sensitive to
movement.
That’s one reason to be aware of what your own body is doing
when you’re
around horses. Extraneous movements, especially if they keep
changing, can
create a lot of confusion in a horse’s brain and lead to
flight behavior (running off,
rearing, kicking). It’s helpful to remind children who are
unfamiliar with horses to
move slowly when they are near.
In strong light, horses’ eyes react in a much different way than
humans. For us,
the pupil gets smaller, until it becomes a small black dot.
In horses, the pupil
narrows to a slit. But unlike a cat, which has a vertical
slit, the horse pupil
shrinks to a horizontal slit.
This special adaptation meets a horse’s need to keep wide open horizons
in view
at all times to watch for predators. The pupils may look
small in the glare, but a
huge range of vision remains unimpaired. In bright sunlight,
a horse appears to
be nearly blind, but it is actually noticing everything you
do.
Myth buster:
Horses are not color blind,
as many folks believe. They have two-
color, or diachromatic vision. This means they see two of the
basic three
wavelengths of visible light, compared to the three-color
vision of most humans.
In other words, horses naturally see the blue and green
colors of the spectrum
and the color variations based upon them, but cannot
distinguish red.