Monocular Vision

Most people who work with horses knows how their left and right brains can work somewhat independently. We've all seen our horses' ears focused in two different directions. We know that the same exercise or a spooky object in the opposite direction can be a whole new ball game.

When it comes to horses' eyes though, if you're anything like me, you learned back in the day about how horses can see with monocular or binocular vision, but you never really thought about what that means. I think I always just kind of chalked it up as horses having really good peripheral vision. In fact, monocular vision means that a horse can point their eyes in two different directions! And I caught it on camera! 

I took this photo of Kachina on the weekend. I happened to zoom in and was like "that looks funky...", then I realized what I was seeing and nerded out a little a lot.

Look at her eyes.... Her left eye is looking forward, directly at me, while her right eye is clearly looking at something off to her side in the distance. Her ears are split the same way. 

Indication of monocular vision on horse with two blue eyes

I even looked online and couldn't find any other photos that show this as clearly. I think Kachina's blue eyes make it more obvious as to where her pupil is than the more common brown eye and dark sclera. Pretty cool!