What Kind of Vision Do Horses Have?

Me, my friend Nancy and her horse, Blue

I want tell you about two kinds of vision in the animal kingdom. The first one is binocular vision. It is when an animal sees straight in front of it. The animal sees two pictures, and its brain crosses them into one. This allows the animal to see far away and to see depth. Predators are likely to have binocular vision so they can see prey in the distance when they are hunting. Some animals that have binocular vision include lions, tigers, polar bears, foxes and even us (humans!) If you don’t know how to tell if an animal has binocular vision, look at its eyes. If they are close together on the front of the head, it most likely has binocular vision.

The second kind of vision is monocular vision. The animals most likely to have this kind of vision would be prey, because it helps them see all the way around their body so they can look for predators easily. They see different pictures with each eye, so they can see a fox in one direction and me holding a carrot in the other. Some animals that have monocular vision are rabbits, goldfish, deer, goats and birds. If you don’t know if an animal has monocular vision, you just look and see if their eyes are on the sides of their head.

My friend Nancy got me started studying vision when she left me an email about horses. Horse vision is really cool, because horses have binocular AND monocular vision. Even with all of this vision, they still have blind spots where they can’t see predators coming. You should not get in these blind spots or else this will happen: