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Why are horses not camouflaged?
Zebras have stripes to hide from (colorblind) predators in the savanna.
Tigers have stripes to hide in a jungle.
Wolves, birds, buffalo, fish etc all look the same as the next animal in their herd.
Horses natural habitat must have been scrub, deserts or plains - how come they developed into the main colours of white, black, chestnut and bay? What was the advantage for that? I believe humans bred in the other colours of palamino, pinto etc, but 4 main colours with addition of socks and stripes etc makes for a lot of variation in a herd.
Forgive me - I have just been watching Sesame street with my little one and the word of the day was Camoflauge. It got me thinking! (the number was 14 and the letter was B if anyone wants to know lol)
I don't know the exact answer to this but I can venture a guess.
1. Horses colors do sort of camouflage them, the sorrels bays chestnuts and blacks all blend when it's most important, at night. During the day horses are fairly capable of taking care of themselves, as a herd.
2. When a herd of horses is huddled, despite the variation they tend to morph into a huge indistinguishable clump in the landscape, white socks blending and balancing shadows. This is another form of camouflage.
An interesting thing to note is the general "racism" horses in a herd display. In a herd of 60 horses, you will often not a smaller group of white, grey or painted horses not fully accepted into the group. As it was explained to me by an old cowboy, this is because the lighter colors do not blend and somehow, horses understand this to be a flaw.
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