Which Water Bucket Colors Do Horses Prefer?
Water is the most essential aspect of any horse’s diet and we as horse owners spend a great deal of time and worry making sure our horses are drinking enough. An adult horse in a cool, comfortable environment, not working, needs a minimum of 7 to 10 gallons of fresh, clean water every day. But have you ever wondered if the color of the bucket can affect how much water your horse drinks?
A Veterinary Hospital in Turkey actually did a scientific experiment to see if horses prefer certain colored buckets. The study aimed to investigate the preference of horses in terms of different colored buckets. They used red, light green, yellow, green, light blue and turquoise buckets and measured how much water was consumed from each bucket. Their study concluded that significantly more water was consumed from the turquoise bucket and it was also observed that the light toned colors (turquoise and light blue) were preferred to dark ones (green, red and yellow). In light of these results, the researchers suggested the use of turquoise or light blue buckets might encourage horses to drink.
I often wondered this and it seem to make sense after I read this study because Shooter has a turquoise water bucket and he is usually my best drinker. Scout has a hot pink bucket and Dreamer has an orange bucket and they definitely drink less than Shooter. I am going to conduct my own experiment and swap out Scout and Dreamer’s buckets for turquoise and light blue and see if their water consumption goes up. I will keep you posted!
You can read the full study here.
Even Shooter chose to take a drink out of the turquoise bucket when I set up this photo.
Just an interesting side note: Horses are thought to have dichromatic color vision which means they do not process intermediate hues therefore only seeing shades of yellow and blue. We on the other hand have trichromatic color vision and see the four basic color hues of green, red, blue and yellow as well as a host of intermediate hues and shades.
