horse people are weird

what does this mean

horses can see demons

@betterbemeta are you able to translate this? Is it true horses can see netherbeings?? Will we ever know the extent of their powers???

I think I have reblogged this before but I’ll answer it again bc its a fascinating answer I feel and i was more funny than informational last time.

The truth is that horses see what they think are nether beings, I guess. They have a perfect storm of sensory perception that, useful for prey beings, marks false positives on mortal danger all the time. Which is advantageous to a flight-based prey species: running from danger when you’re super fast is much ‘cheaper’ than fighting, so you waste almost nothing from running from a threat that’s not there. Versus, you blow everything if you don’t see a threat that is there.

Horses also have their eyes positioned on the sides of their heads, which gives them an incredible range of peripheral vision almost around their entire body with only a few blind spots you can sneak up on them in. But this comes at the cost of binocular vision; they can only judge distance for things straight ahead of them. Super useful for preventing predators sneaking up from the sides or behind, but useless for recognizing familiar shapes with the precision we can.

Basically we now have a walking couch with anxiety its going to get attacked at any second, that can see almost everything, but mostly only out of the corner of its eye. It has a few blind spots and anything that suddenly appears out of them is terrifying to it. Combine that with that it actually has far superior low-light vision than us, and that its ears can swivel in any directions like radar dishes, and you’ve basically given a nervous wreck a highly accurate but imprecise danger-dar.

To be concise: all horses, even the most chill horses, on some level believe they are living in a survival horror.

This means that you could approach it in a flapping poncho and if it can’t recognize your shape as human, they mistake you for SATAN… or you could pass this one broken down tractor you’ve passed 100 times on a trail ride, but today is the day it will ATTACK… or your horse could feel a horsefly bite from its blind spot and MAMA, I’VE BEEN HIT!!!… or you could both approach a fallen log in the woods but in the low light your horse is going to see the tree rings as THE EYE OF MORDOR.

However, they actually have kind of a cool compensation for this– they are social animals, and instinctively look towards leadership. In the wild or out at pasture, this is their most willful, pushy, decisive leader horse who decides where to go and where it’s safe. But humans often take this role both as riders and on the ground. They are always watching and feeling for human reactions to things. This is why moving in a calm, decisive way and always giving clear commands is key to working with this kind of animal. Confusing commands, screaming, panic, visible distress, and chaos will signal to a horse that you, brave leader are freaked out… so it should freak out too!

On one hand, you’ll get horses that will decide that they are the leader and you are not, so getting them to listen to you can be tough– requiring patience and skill more than force. On the other hand, a good enough rider and a well-trained horse (or a horse with specialized training) can venture into dangerous situations, loud and scary environments, etc. calmly and confidently.

The joke in OP though is that many horses that are bred to be very fast, like thoroughbreds, are also bred and encouraged to be high-energy and highstrung. Making them more anxious and prone to seeing those ‘demons.’ All horses in a sense are going to be your anxious friend, but racehorses and polo ponies and other sport horses can sometimes be your anxious friend that thinks they live in Silent Hill.

Reblogging some horse knowledge for certain people who write fantasy books but know nothing about horses *cough cough*

reblogging for the line “Basically we now have a walking couch with anxiety”.

Also: horses have very limited depth perception. You know that thing where you out your finger on the bridge of your nose and it disappears because it’s behind your field of vision? Now imagine your nose is as long as a horse’s. The blind spot in front of a horse’s nose is huge, four to six feet or so. When a horse jumps, it can’t see the fence, it has to be trained / remember to look for it and remember where it is and how high. They cannot tell if that is a spot of oil or a black hole in the road. It’s probably a black hole. Better avoid it.

Horses can’t see your hand, they smell the treat (and use very sensitive skin/whiskers to feel.) Some horses are garbage at doing this gently, just absolutely awful, but remember - they can’t see what they’re doing.

Horses also have partial color vision - they see horse relevant colors. Blue, yellow and therefore green. No red derived colors. If you want to see an anxious couch have a bad trip, ride it in an arena with alternating sections of purple and yellow seating. Grey grey YELLOW YELLOW HOLY SHIIIIIIIT. Every single horse would walk past the purple seats and go OH MY FUCK at the yellow ones. This is why the bright red (grey) bucket isn’t a problem, but oH my FfffffffffSHIttTTTT do they notice a stray yellow plastic grocery bag.

Last statement here is, instinct tells a horse that anything clinging to your back is going to eat you. That we spend so much effort convincing them otherwise is amazing and in general a testament to the human race’s commitment to Bad Ideas.

Thank u horse science side of tumblr

If you want to see an anxious couch have a bad trip is by far my most fav sentence

The barn I grew up riding at had an orange pole.

That thing ate horses. That thing was not safe to jump. Because orange.

thank you horse tumblr; now I will always see these majestic beasts as anxious couches with too much peripheral vision and bad danger-dar.

One interesting thing is that they will actually relax very quickly if they do manage to identify and assess the threat.

I was riding out on the Wyoming range, with a group, on a well-trained, finished horse when I felt my horse start to tense in readiness to GO. I was taking a deep breath because this was not a place for it.

Before I finished, she’d relaxed again.

I looked around.

Then I saw the wolf.

Yup.

Wolf.

Not that far away from us, a bit further down in the valley.

My horse, with her honed prey senses, had spotted the wolf, identified it as a predator, assessed what the wolf was doing and decided it wasn’t a threat. I hadn’t even seen her.

Yes, her. We know it was a her because the person with field glasses determined that she had a little squirming scrap of grey fur in her mouth - a breeding bitch moving her pups to a new den.

My horse knew that this one, very busy wolf was not a threat to eight horses and humans.

This was a range-trained horse, mind. She was smart and had encountered wolves before.

Reblogging for this latest story, which is new to me.

My parents are both horse people. Can confirm.

Another thing to consider: horses are prey animals. In the wild, any sudden movement is usually an ambush predator out to eat them (whether a big cat or a snake), so they’re programed from millions of years of evolution to panic and run at the first sign of trouble.

Some horses are smarter and calmer than others (like people, they all have different personalities), most can be desensitized from an early age (usually by being gently exposed to things that most horses find scary, allowed to investigate it, then realize, “Oh, it’s not scary”), and when allowed to investigate most horses can come to terms with and stop being scared of the thing they thought was scary.

Similar to the above wolf story, my mom LOVES to tell the story about the time she went on a trail ride with her horse, and right in front of them on the path a big, fat rattle snake slithered up in front of her hooves, and started rattling its tail.

My mom’s horse just stopped, looked at it, and then very slowly and very calmly walked backwards 50 steps, then just stood there calmly on the trail. My mom decided not to pressure her to keep going, but just let her stand there for a nice long 10-15 minutes, then eventually the rattle snake slithered away of its own accord. Then my mom’s horse kind of hung her head, rotated her ears, and was ready to keep walking like nothing happened.