Scientists find one answer:
[Edited to remove non-working link]
While white horses are more susceptible to skin cancer and predation, being white protects them against diseases carried by horseflies!
There's a link to the full article on the Nature web site.
(Edit - since the first link was bad, you can try this one: http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2009.2202)
Why horses wear white
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Why horses wear white
Last edited by aethervox on Fri May 07, 2010 6:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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BlazingColours
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I can not read the article. I can tell you that my white coloured horses get bitten as much by the various flies/bugs as the non white horses.
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BlazingColours wrote:I can not read the article. I can tell you that my white coloured horses get bitten as much by the various flies/bugs as the non white horses.
According to the summary in Nature:
Gábor Horváth at Eötvös University in Budapest and his colleagues tracked the landing frequency of horseflies on horses of different colours. The flies preferred black and brown horses. When the team covered horse models in transparent glue, more than 15 times as many horseflies stuck to dark models as to white ones.
They do say that this only tested horsefly preferences.