colour vision

Cahill

Cahill

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Always brought up with the idea that horses and dogs don`t see colours as we do.
Well,my pony has one of those hook over plastic feed buckets that lives on the fence,it was blue.the other day i bought him a red one and gave the old one to another pony.
I put his new bucket on the fence today while he was in the field and when it was time to come in for his tea he came trotting down,saw the new colour and stopped dead in his tracks(nearly a shy,)well he thought for a moment,remembered his dinner and carried on as normal.
So,after seeing this I would say that horses do see colours.
 
I've always thought that horses see colour, judging by their reactions to certain fillers, etc. And a yellow tractor is always scarier than a blue one.
 
I find all tractors scarey and me and pon do telepathic thoughts to each other but I cant block out the tractor one!!
 
I dont think they see in colour but they see in shades of black and white. In nature red is a warning colour as is yellow and black. I suspect that is why horses react to these colours.
 
Horses can see colours there's loads of research done on it. They see slightly differently to people though, hang on will just look up my notes then tell you...
 
Ok, unlike humans who have trichromatic vision (can see the three primary colours, blue, red and yellow and all colours mixed from them), horses have dichromatic vision, they can see two primary colours; red and blue.
Horses are most sensitive to greeny blue coloured light. they can differentiate best between blue and orange. Red's close to orange so for your pony it would have been a really obvious change, but not scary enough to put him off his dinner
laugh.gif
 
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