The Art of Natural Dressage

Once again the topic of how and what a horse sees and the effect on horse handling strategies has come up.

Points I've made about vision of horses are based on my reading the research.

Color perception in the horse is quite different than in humans as they have a dichromic set of receptors while ours is trichromic - two versus three gives us far more color perception than horse's have. Apparently too, horses have a greater individual variation than we do across the population of individuals.

This particular paper, though I found somewhat dense to read through, had some interesting points to consider. The section on color perception I found particularly suited to a present discussion.

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijz/2009/721798.html

There is some extraordinary useful comment and speculation in the article as to horse behavior based on horse visual characteristics.

One of the things I noticed over the years is supported in theory in this article, that horses more often misjudge white jump rails from those with color, and consequently hit or even run through white ones, but never other colors - though I've not seen a pure black jump standard and rail set.

I cannot find anything in the article concerning my belief from observation that white and black are "puzzle colors," to the horse, but until proof otherwise I will continue to go by my observations. No other colors, to my knowledge and experience, consistently prove to be anxiety or startle provoking as black and white seems to be to the horse.

I am not fond of white fence rails for this reason. Horses new to them are as likely to run into them as away from them, and I've seen both. Horses seem to me to take green and brown ones calmly and do not run into them, though of course over time they'll learn to push on them.

I use tape fencing system (electrically charged) that has both green and brown halves, top and bottom, and chose it over white for this color perception horse characteristic. I've notice the elk and deer both seem to see it quite well also.

Another but more easy to read article is available at:

http://www.equisearch.com/horses_care/health/anatomy/colorvision_012706/

I believe the point is made that how a horse sees a color is less important than how a horse reacts to a color.

Donald, Altea, and Bonnie Cupcake.

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Love is Trust, trust is All
~~~~~~~~~
So say Don, Altea, and Bonnie the Wonder Filly.

I've placed a piece in "Theory: Research and Training Methods" on horse visual perception, citing two research sources that I think might be of interest. Neither address black and white perception issues but do refer to colors that horses can see and their reactions to colors being of behavioral interest.

http://www.artofnaturaldressage.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3499&p=65424#p65424

Donald, Altea, and Bonnie Cupcake

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Love is Trust, trust is All
~~~~~~~~~
So say Don, Altea, and Bonnie the Wonder Filly.

I merged this post with the topic on equine vision that you posted three years ago, so that we have it all in one place. Great info, thanks for sharing!

oh thanks Don!!!
I'll have to something new and interesting to read this evening

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www.equusuniversalis.com

hmmm food for thought and much to read i see.
But now i am wondering... Why are all the leadropes then black or white? (most sold ones) is there somre reason for this?
My leadrope is now grey and not white anymore

Thanks Romy,

I went looking for that thread but for some reason couldn't locate it. Probably got impatient with my slow dialup system and moved on too soon before pages loaded fully.

Makes sense to keep these together.

Best wishes, Don, Altea, and Bonnie Cupcake

_________________
Love is Trust, trust is All
~~~~~~~~~
So say Don, Altea, and Bonnie the Wonder Filly.

Now for the next part. I find myself, more often than not, forgetting the knowledge I've gained, even that from years ago. The problem with that failure on my part is that I may ask the horse to do something in a way that does not account for the knowledge and become impatient with the horse when he needs my patience and support.

The articles I cited remind me that a horse visually patterns, where we focus and have to teach ourselves the simple skill we had as little infants to pattern our visual input.

I must remember to wait as I ask the horse to process a visual landscape I have put him in and ask him to deal with. Altea reminds me of this often. She has been in and out of the trailer so many times I've lost count. Yet each time she drops her nose at the entrance and gives a little snort of concern.

She's taught me to stop and wait a moment for her brain to process her vision - then she steps right in with no fuss - but should I attempt to rush her she then shows signs of nervousness, though she will get in.

Bonnie, of course, shows the same thing, and wise horse handlers over the centuries have known this and use, in training the green horse, what is now called, as though it were a new and wonderful discovery of today's clinicians, "approach and retreat."

Rushing will get you kicked ... as I had the humorous (bad me) reaction to seeing a famous clinician get nailed because he was rushing a green mare into accepting the bridle. Ooooo...did she ever nail him.

This is one thing I never quite understand about horse handlers that don't get it about horses. They expect from the horse what they, and other humans, would not tolerate themselves. Being rushed into new situations.

For a long time, though I understood full well and applied the approach and retreat concept and the patient time taking required in most horse handling, I did not get that the eyes, just like other sensory apparatus signals, all go to the same brain and is processed at much the same speed.

The horse get's the signal as fast on all channels, scent, hearing, touch, vision. They even have very immediate reactions we can see, or feel as the horse spooks out from under us. but for them to process it into the thinking area, match up memory tracks, and makes conclusions that takes somewhat longer than the signal speed over the nervous system.

We aren't much different than horse's in this way.

Donald, Altea, and Bonnie Cupcake

_________________
Love is Trust, trust is All
~~~~~~~~~
So say Don, Altea, and Bonnie the Wonder Filly.

A challenge for horse handlers, be they AND style, or other, is that horses are going to meet all kinds of visual stimuli in their lives, and running into black and white is going to occur often.

So we need to get them accustomed to them. What better way than having a lot of low provocative objects about in those colors - things they see every day.

It's the biggies that trip up the horse - not riding where there are public roads much then running across one, with that fearsome long long long white line running to the horse's visual infinity each direction, forcing both eyes to process together. Whew! It boggles my mind I know.

My favorite is the white horse trailer. There are so many and preferred at that, that it's strange that horse's still react, after years of familiarity to them, with anxiety in front of one.

The things about horses that confound us so often are often explainable simply if we study the horse long enough, both as individuals and collectively.

Every horse handler should have in his or her relationship repertoire with the horse this kind of information and thus strategies for both building their relationship as well as helping the horse develop his or her own potential.

Here's a partial list. Many are shared by horse and humans. Others are invited to add to it:

Blind spot management (I hate cars with blind spots - and even more so when backing out of my driveway).

Scent communication

Tactile sets for a horse, where he likes being touched and how, and were he does NOT like it and how.

Sounds that trip the horse's anxiety switch. Drag a chain over metal, and watch the horse react.

Things the approaching low and sneaky.

Overhead approaching objects

The sounds of food. Preparation sounds in particular can be very good handling devices ... If I want my horse's in from the far end of their paddock, hidden from me by the tress, all I need do is unfasten the feed room door latch, loudly. Of course I've added a whistle so that all I really have to do now to call 'Shadofax,' as Gandolph the Grey does, is to whistle. Wanna bet the owner used food to train for that little trick?

Donald, Altea, and Bonnie Cupcake

_________________
Love is Trust, trust is All
~~~~~~~~~
So say Don, Altea, and Bonnie the Wonder Filly.

Well now. This information made my jaw drop. All the way to the floor.

I remember commenting quite soon after I got Freckles that he goes better if I ride in a pale blue shirt and worse if I ride in a black shirt

I actually had an experienced friend of mine compare how well Freckles was tracking up in blue compared to black, white and another colour (I can't remember what the 3rd colour was,) so it wasn't just an emotional idea that may or may not have been valid. He truly does go better if I wear light blue - sky colour.

and now perhaps I have some reason for why that is.

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Glen Grobler

Words that soak into your ears are whispered...not yelled. Anon

Nevertheless your experiments are very important. Just doing them can turn up new perspectives and so objectives can change.

What I'm curious about are those things I suspect we cannot easily, or for that matter at all, change a horse's responses to. The rattling chain I mentioned in an earlier post seems a constant. It's rare I see a horse that doesn't show at least some residual reaction to it. Sort of like a dog responds to a throw collar, I think they call it. The sound of the chain seems to set something in motion in the brain.

A rope line ripping over a fence used to set off Dakota strongly. And things passing through his blind spot below the head and low toward his feet would trigger the fight response immediately. He would duck his head and try to jump on whatever it was - the reason the Chase the Tiger response is so strong in many horses I believe.

I couple of times I moved horses with a cutting horse and unless the horses are ponies the experienced cow horse would not move other horses - too tall I believe. If an animal is below eye level then the cutter drops his head to go eye to eye, but if the other animal can lift his head high enough (another horse in my experience) the cutter will not work.

Humans I believe have some similar behavioral responses to position. When I used to play Raquetball I loved putting a low rising shoot return on my opponent. He'd have, or she, a terrible time dealing with a rising shot, but if I miscalculated and the shot returned at waist or higher level off the board the opponent cold nail it.

We are reactive to lower moving things, as are horses. I suspect because we were hunted and stalked by similar predators.

I can't help but wonder if Freckles would react to a white blouse like he does the black one, with less good a ride.

Of course we've spoiled the neutrality of stimuli in the experiment by talking about it and speculating. Of course you could have someone ride him and change shirts who didn't know what your objective was for each color.

I tend to wear a lot of blue shirts myself, and I'll have to see if Bonnie and Altea respond any differently to them.

Donald, Altea, and Bonalaria Magdalena

_________________
Love is Trust, trust is All
~~~~~~~~~
So say Don, Altea, and Bonnie the Wonder Filly.

I wonder if the objection to white objects is in some ways connected to a fear of death in horses and for that matter in cattle. The whitest thing I can think of in the natural enviroment, (other than plants) is bleached bones . My experience here with both horses and cattle is that they are VERY wary of bones lying in the paddock. Sure to cause much shying in a horse and a mob of cattle will mill around bellowing and refuse to go on until really forced. (How huge a bone is the white line in the middle of a sealed road??).
Just wondering other peoples thoughts? I guess we and Americans living on the land may be more likely to experience bleached bones lying about than those living in Europe.
Peg

Probably - except for us, since this year.

My neighbour bought lots of big white ducks and some sheep and now he is slaughtering some of them, takes what he needs and throws the rest into the bushes in a certain place of his property. So now the predators (martens, foxes) come, take the bones and fur and whatever there is, and eat it. Unfortunately they don't eat it there but carry it to my pasture, where they leave the rests after they are finished. This is why my horses are very used to bones, only I feel a bit strange when I am working on the pasture and suddenly there is a skull or a jaw right in front of my feet.

I am very glad that the animals eat those rests, though. Would be such a pity to have slaughtered an animal and then throwing away so much of it.

Anyway, my horses never showed any hesitation to go there, also when it was a very visible white object like the wing of a duck. I also never saw them being scared by other white objects. Maybe they just got used to it since most of our fence is white.

I just found this and thought it was very intriguing:

De Boyer Des Roches, A., Richard-Yris, M.A., Henry, S., Ezzaouïa, M., & Hausberger, M. (2008). Laterality and emotions: visual laterality in the domestic horse (Equus caballus) differs with objects' emotional value. Physiology and Behavior, 94(3), 487-490.

Abstract
Lateralization of emotions has received great attention in the last decades, both in humans and animals, but little interest has been given to side bias in perceptual processing. Here, we investigated the influence of the emotional valence of stimuli on visual and olfactory explorations by horses, a large mammalian species with two large monocular visual fields and almost complete decussation of optic fibres. We confronted 38 Arab mares to three objects with either a positive, negative or neutral emotional valence (novel object). The results revealed a gradient of exploration of the 3 objects according to their emotional value and a clear asymmetry in visual exploration. When exploring the novel object, mares used preferentially their right eyes, while they showed a slight tendency to use their left eyes for the negative object. No asymmetry was evidenced for the object with the positive valence. A trend for an asymmetry in olfactory investigation was also observed. Our data confirm the role of the left hemisphere in assessing novelty in horses like in many vertebrate species and the possible role of the right hemisphere in processing negative emotional responses. Our findings also suggest the importance of both hemispheres in the processing positive emotions. This study is, to our knowledge, the first to demonstrate clearly that the emotional valence of a stimulus induces a specific visual lateralization pattern.

I have a PDF of the full article, if you want it, just email me (romy.mueller@psychologie.tu-dresden.de).

Very interesting.
This would also be another hint to why positive training makes the horse think more. Only in a positive environment the left hemisphere would be free to process the inputs rationally. Otherwise if training is associated with negative experiences, a horse would process rather with the right hemisphere. Thus acting more irrational or emotional.

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Volker

The horse owes us nothing.

Now, of course, I have to remember an article I read on the horse ridden with the face behind the vertical. It claimed, without citation of research though, and I did not look at the footnotes, that that certain nerves along the pathway to the brain or compressed and interfered with thus compromising the horse's ability to comprehend and process incoming information.

I'm currently involved, rather deeply, on a FB forum called Classical Horsemanship, which of course isn't the least about horsemanship but about dressage and the defense of the modern style of riding dressage and great confusion about what is classical or not.

I am well received by some and roundly personally attacked by others. It's fascinating when one knows how and why stereotypes, thus prejudices formed, to watch the reaction to scientific research interjected into the forum.

I dropped a piece on how more than 80% of horses heads (jaws) showed bone spurs as a result of the use of bits. I might as well have spit in the punchbowl. Of course that figure attacks the concept that educated hands are not going to harm the horse.

Bringing up bitless there, except for a few, has quite an effect.

_________________
Love is Trust, trust is All
~~~~~~~~~
So say Don, Altea, and Bonnie the Wonder Filly.