"She was only a jockey's daughter, but all the horsemen knew her"

If you were a horse, and you were thundering down the backstretch at Old Hilltop, what you would be seeing in front of you would look totally different from what the jockey riding you sees. And it has nothing to do with how much mud is on the jockey's goggles.

They're big and brown, a horse's eyes, but they work differently from our peepers.

At the University of Exeter, they researched horse eyes and found some differences that go beyond just being interesting - they affect racetrack safety.

So if this helps you win at Pimlico someday, remember to duke me in! 

F'rinstance, race people thought it would be a good idea to paint crossbars on fences and hurdles orange, because we see orange and it alerts us to be careful.

But Professor Martin Stevens, who lectures on sensory and evolutionary ecology at Exeter, has shown that to horses, orange shows up as sort of green, meaning that horses see orange as looking like grass, so they get no warning.

And Dr. Janel L. Jones, a cognitive scientist, says that what humans can see from 30 feet, a horse can only see from 20 feet.

And Mr Ed is the only horse who could get away with wearing glasses.

"A horse has to be 50% closer to see the same details," Dr Jones says. "A 50% deficiency is enough for any rider to consider...even in sunshine, the horse's view of a jump is blurry, hazy, dim, vague...all the adjectives you'd rather not ponder as you're galloping 30 feet per second towards a big oxer (fence) that could ruin your day."

So, people at the U of Exeter tried painting obstacles and such white and yellow. This did not help the horses see the fences any better, it helped them jump better.

And of course, the hope is that jockeys and horses will be safer from falls and spills and the injuries they cause because of all this work. 

Prof. Stevens explains that whereas we humans have three types of cone cells in our eyes, horses only have two.

So, "Basically it means they can only see colors that we only perceive as blues and yellows and they can't tell the difference between reds and greens," he said.

Which is why you never get a Christmas gift from a horse! They don't see all the red and green decorations!