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Another reason to mount from the left!
Horses show left-eye preference in relation to people
August 10, 2009
Horses generally prefer to scan people with their left eye, researchers have found.
The findings appear to provide a sound basis for mounting a horse from the left.
Researchers Kate Farmer, Konstanze Krueger and Richard Byrne said most horses have a side on which they are easier to handle and a direction they favour when working on a circle.
Recent studies have suggested a correlation between emotion and visual laterality - the preference for one side over the other - when horses observe inanimate objects.
As such, the localisation of function on one side of the brain could provide important clues regarding the horse's cognitive processes.
The team, whose findings have just been published in the Journal of Animal Cognition, set out to explore whether horses also showed a right or left side preference in association with people.
"We gave horses the choice of entering a chute to left or right, with and without the passive, non-interactive presence of a person unknown to them.
"The left eye was preferred for scanning under both conditions, but significantly more so when a person was present.
"Traditionally, riders handle horses only from the left, so we repeated the experiment with horses specifically trained on both sides.
"Again, there was a consistent preference for left eye scanning in the presence of a person, whether known to the horses or not.
"We also examined horses interacting with a person, using both traditionally and bilaterally trained horses. Both groups showed left eye preference for viewing the person, regardless of training and test procedure.
"For those horses tested under both passive and interactive conditions, the left eye was preferred significantly more during interaction.
"We suggest that most horses prefer to use their left eye for assessment and evaluation, and that there is an emotional aspect to the choice which may be positive or negative, depending on the circumstances."
The researchers said they believed the results have important practical implications and that emotional laterality should be taken into account in training methods.
August 10, 2009
Horses generally prefer to scan people with their left eye, researchers have found.
The findings appear to provide a sound basis for mounting a horse from the left.
Researchers Kate Farmer, Konstanze Krueger and Richard Byrne said most horses have a side on which they are easier to handle and a direction they favour when working on a circle.
Recent studies have suggested a correlation between emotion and visual laterality - the preference for one side over the other - when horses observe inanimate objects.
As such, the localisation of function on one side of the brain could provide important clues regarding the horse's cognitive processes.
The team, whose findings have just been published in the Journal of Animal Cognition, set out to explore whether horses also showed a right or left side preference in association with people.
"We gave horses the choice of entering a chute to left or right, with and without the passive, non-interactive presence of a person unknown to them.
"The left eye was preferred for scanning under both conditions, but significantly more so when a person was present.
"Traditionally, riders handle horses only from the left, so we repeated the experiment with horses specifically trained on both sides.
"Again, there was a consistent preference for left eye scanning in the presence of a person, whether known to the horses or not.
"We also examined horses interacting with a person, using both traditionally and bilaterally trained horses. Both groups showed left eye preference for viewing the person, regardless of training and test procedure.
"For those horses tested under both passive and interactive conditions, the left eye was preferred significantly more during interaction.
"We suggest that most horses prefer to use their left eye for assessment and evaluation, and that there is an emotional aspect to the choice which may be positive or negative, depending on the circumstances."
The researchers said they believed the results have important practical implications and that emotional laterality should be taken into account in training methods.
Views: 71
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Eileen on
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I don't know what my horse prefers, but I do know that I have and will mount my horses from any side that is most available to me at the time. Quite often on the trail I find it necessary to dismount for what ever reason. It is not always handy to get on from the left side of a horse nor is it easy to dismount on the left side. Through the many years that I have been riding on the trail, there has never been a problem or issue of what side I get on or off my horse. None of my horses mind how or where I get on. It is just not an issue. I think that man has made it an issue, not the horse. lol We have been trained to think one way and never venture out of the box. While all of the time the horse did not realize that there even was a box. There have been times when I also dismount from the tail end, and that was not a problem either.
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Permalink Reply by Barbara F. on
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I've dismounted over horses' heads a number of times. Does that count? ;)
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Permalink Reply by Fiona Hill on
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He he he! :-) I guess as long as you made sure you went over the left hand side your horse will have seen you coming!!
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Interesting piece of research, but am not sure how well it can be generalised. Sounds like too many confounding variables to me. Mind you, I guess people are either right or left hand dominant, so it's feasible that animals would have a similar preference for using one side of the body more than the other.
By the way, I believe the tradition of mounting from the left goes back to the days of the military when the rider wore a sword - and the only way to get on without stabbing the horse to death was to get on from the left. ;-)
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Permalink Reply by Jackie Cochran on
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Just one more example that the old European & and Asian horse people knew what they were doing. I know that mounting on the left is not universal, but different genetic lines of horses may have different "handiness". If I was trying to handle a wild horse I sure would be doing everything I could to get the horse to cooperate.
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