My horses don't like red buckets!

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Gwena

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Does anyone else have horses who are choosy over their bucket colour?.

In my field I have a red water bucket (the big Rhino ones) and a blue one. The blue bucket is always nearly empty and the red one full...I have checked for leaks! When the little pony came and I gave him his feed in a red bucket he was really suspicious - but didn't bat an eyelid when I brought him a new blue bucket.
Bl**dy horses!
 
Yep , bought Foxy a purple bucket for water in stable and she only ever drinks out of the black, wierd no idea why she won't drink out the purple one, took it out in the end and she now has 2 black buckets :)
 
my old pony would only drink out of HIS blue water bucket, nothing else. Even if it was still a blue water bucket that just wasn't his he wouldn't drink from it! crazy pony :rolleyes:
 
Delicious_D said:
Arent horses colour blind?
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No, I don't think so. As an example some qoutes from this link Understanding how your horse sees.

''The structure and position of their eyes is somewhat different than ours and this makes a difference in the distance, color, vividness and visual field a horse experiences."

"Horse do see color, but they may not see it as vividly as we do. This is because they can only see two of the three visible wavelengths in the light spectrum. This is somewhat similar to the way people who are colorblind see. So your horse doesn't see the color red, but they can see blues and greens. So the lovely red apple or the orange carrot you offer as a treat may actually appear brownish or greenish."

"They may not see color as well as we do, but because they have more of the structures that pick up light, they see much better at night, or in darker conditions than we do."
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728519_coloreyes.gif
:)
 
Re the buckets, maybe it is because the shape of the bucket is not easily distinguished from the grass and the blue one is more visible, although not sure why the pony wouldn't like a red/'green looking' bucket in the stable!
 
They are definitely not colour blind. I'm 100% certain, as I bought some orange wooly gloves and my mare was convinced my fingers were carrots. I don't only ever wear black/dark gloves either, I have various pinks, blues, greens, greys, so it wasn't just a new 'shade' that confused her, and the gloves were a real 'carroty' orange! I don't wear them*any more as she tries to eat my fingers, then has a huff when she realises they're not edible :)
 
I did ride for a while an old mare that was scared of yellow tractors.
Blue tractors, red tractors, green tractors were fine.
Yellow ones were horse-eating monsters :confused:
 
Not sure if this is worth mentioning but some colours effect the temperature of the water.... At our last yard the horses would always drink out of the green bucket as the others got warmer quicker!!
 
I have lots of buckets in most colours but it is always the red ones that some of the horses don't seem to like drinking from. I wondered whether it could be the additive put in the plastic to make it red that was the problem rather than the colour itself. Just a thought.
 
My boy doesn't much like yellow- we had one ride where he wouldn't walk past yellow dumpy bags, yellow road markings and then, at the sight of yellow budgies I was nearly deposited in the front of a yellow convertible (driver wasn't thrilled). No idea what that was all about...
Oh and he did full on snorting and pawing at the scary dragon bright canary coloured Seat Ibiza being driven veeery slowly by an elderly lady on the same ride. Really weird because we've seen lots of yellow things since without similar drama and he happily drinks out of yellow buckets. I put it down to him being a grump!
 
Blitzen said:
They are definitely not colour blind. I'm 100% certain, as I bought some orange wooly gloves and my mare was convinced my fingers were carrots. I don't only ever wear black/dark gloves either, I have various pinks, blues, greens, greys, so it wasn't just a new 'shade' that confused her, and the gloves were a real 'carroty' orange! I don't wear them*any more as she tries to eat my fingers, then has a huff when she realises they're not edible :)
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Ever since I got my first bitch many years ago, I've always given my bitches a few pieces of carrot daily, one day one of my bitches spotted the handles of the secateurs that I had laid down beside me, they're exactly the right carrot orange and I still to this day remember how I could tell from her body language that she definitely thought that the handles where edible. At least up until she came up close enough to sniff them over, and then she slouched away.

However, this doesn't have to prove that dogs/horses can see orange (I'm not saying that that is what you said), but perhaps carrot orange to them = a very distinct, special type of brown or green, which they only see in carrot orange things and nowhere else.

 
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