Why the colour does play a role with showjumping fences…

A nice orange on your saddle pad or a fashionable blue horse boot… it’s all fun and ‘it’, but when those colors shine bright on the fence, we do like them a little less. Recent studies show more insight on how horses see these colors.

Visual information is key to how many animals interact with their environment, and much research has investigated how animals respond to colour and brightness information in the natural world. Understanding the visibility of features in anthropogenic environments, and how animals respond to these, is also important, not least for the welfare and safety of animals and the humans they co-exist with, but has received comparatively less attention.

Difference between humans and horses

The main difference between riders and horses? Horses have a dichromatic color vision. While humans experience a trichromatic color vision. This means we have three cones, enabling us to see more colors.

A horses world is a little les colorful. The horses’ spectrum is between blue and yellow. That is why horses cannot see red, orange and green.

The difference also implies horses experience the fences completely different as humans. This conclusion must also make us aware on how to build and style fences for horses safety เว็บไซต์ของบริษัท.

The study

The visibility of fences is strongly affected by colour type (e.g. orange or blue) and luminance (e.g. light blue or dark blue). Current colours and materials used for the takeoff boards, midrails, and top edge of fences (orange paint, orange waterproof material, and natural vegetation) offer variable and frequently low visibility to horses, whereas other colours such as blue, yellow, and white offer much higher visibility

Read the full report here