This happened to me...
A horse has a blind spot directly in front of him, and that's why he moves his head from side to side slighty as he walks. He doesn't know he has the blind spot. He also has independent vision in the lower portion of each eye-his near vision- and not only can he see the rider on his back as he walks, but his own feet and to each side as well. His eyes give his brain three images--an image from each of his eyes in his near vision, and a composite image from both of his eyes in his binocular vision. His eyes don't see as many colors as do ours, and their resolution isn't quite as good as ours, but he's real good at detecting movement. His ears feed his brain more info than our ears do, and he swivels them to the slightest sound. We turn to look when something catches our atttention, he just turns an ear, and his ear tells hime exactly the direction the sound is coming from. Horses can "look" in two directions at the same time, using their ears.

I was working a new horse for a pack station, preparing him to use as a packer's horse. He'd been green broke, then used as a packhorse for a season. He was good on rocks and rough terrain, but-having been in the middle of a pack string, his view was always blocked by his load and the animals in front of him-he had no visual experience in the back country. One morning I packed and strung up some mules, mounted the horse, and took off to pick up some dudes scheduled to come out of the back country. I'd used this horse to take them out, and didn't figure on having problems.

That year several large trees had been blown down across one section of trail by winter storms, and I'd had to figure a way to get around them. No problem in this case, just bust a little brush. The horse had done fine on the previous trip, and was as good a brush crasher as I'd ever ridden. Well, this time, when I got to the fallen trees, I discovered that the Forest Service finally had gotten around to cutting out portions of the trees that blocked the trail, leaving the rest of each tree where it lay, on both sides of the trail. I thought, cool, no brushy goarounds to mess with this time.

As we approached the first tree I stopped and turned to look at the mule's packs, to make sure everthing was okay, then, gigged my horse and told him to go ahead.

He wouldn't move. He was staring at the log across the trail with his front vision, and I knew right away that he couldn't see the gap in the log. When I turned his head a little so he could see the gap, he started shaking. His eyes had just told his brain two different things, and he believed them both. Head forward, no gap, head to the side, a gap. We did this a few times, but it didn't help.

I gave him a cue to step forward slightly, and he carefully approached the log, still comparing the two images he was getting, and shaking in confusion-he was upset that I'd given him a cue that he didn't think he could execute; if it were up to him, he'd have just walked around the log, the way we'd gone a few days before.

My heart went out to him because he was trying to do what I wanted, but it was clear to him that I was telling him to do something he wasn't capable of doing.

I urged him gently to the log, to let him feel for it with his chest. When he couldn't feel it, he stepped through it. Well he hopped through it. There were four or five more blowdowns to handle. We did each one the same way, because as far as he was concerned his eyes were telling him the truth--even though his two visions disagreed--but there was some magic about the blowdowns that he couldn't understand. After the first couple of logs, I let him pause, then cued him through, and he trusted me to sort out the confused images he was getting. On the way back in the next day, he signaled me for instruction when we got to the blowdowns, but he walked right through them when I told him to go ahead.

I know more about horses and mules than I know about people, so that's why I'm writing this. I could have beaten that poor bastard when he first refused to step through the gap, but I understood that he was not simply disobeying me. If I had beaten him I would have destroyed his trust in me. If I had beaten him it would have been because I was pissed off that a mere animal dared to disobey me. I would have been pissed off because, if he disobeyed me on some of those trails, he might have gotten me killed. In short, I would have been pissed off because I was afraid. I would have gone through all that because of things in me, not realizing what was going on with the horse, and I might have ruined the horse in the process.

One of the things I really hated to see was when hard-headed wranglers kicked the shit out of their horses just because they ran out of ideas about how to train them. Handling horses and mules has gone a long way in taking the arrogance out of my fears. Good luck on figuring how all that fits into anything else we have in common, it's the best I can do just now.