11/09/2025
They are amazing!!♥️
I was doing some research on horses eyesight and found it fascinating so I thought I would share some facts with you guys - feel free to share 😊 if you have a horse who regularly spooks, have a read!😊🐴
Did you know horses have the largest eyes out of ALL land mammals? 😁
The first image is a humans eyesight and what we see. The second is a horses eyesight. They have a blind spot directly in front of them and cannot “merge” their vision into one image like we can. This makes it all the more incredible at how the horse can jump, especially when we ask them to jump “skinny” fences and combinations 😱
Horses do not focus their eyes the way we do. Have you ever seen a horse raising and lowering its head as it looks at an object? It does that to adjust the focal length, moving until the object comes into focus on its retina. When you see a horse shy at a sudden movement behind him or next to him, his peripheral vision has sighted the movement but has not yet had time to focus on it.
Even when the horse has focused as best it can, its sight is only three-fifths that of a human. In other words, when looking at an object twenty feet away, the horse sees only as much detail as a person would see if the object were thirty-five feet away. Simply, when you are out riding and see a strange object ahead, you will recognize what you are seeing long before your horse does.
So we can cut our horses some slack when they spook at something that we think is “silly” 😁
Another interesting fact is that the right eye reports to the right side of the brain and the left eye reports to the left side of the brain. This explains why horses may spook on the right rein and then after showing them the object they go past it fine, but when you change rein they still spook at it again on the left rein.
Contrary to popular belief, horses CAN also perceive depth. "Apparently, horses have many of the same depth-detecting skills that we have. They have true stereoscopic vision, despite having lateral eyes."
When you really think about it, isn’t it incredible that we, as a predatory being, can ride upon the back of a horse, a prey animal who’s every instinct tells it to run from us? 🐎
Horses are amazing ♥️
Original post and photo credit: Sophie Seymour
Thank you Sophie Seymour for sharing your research with us.
