Internet divided as they can't work out which way horse is moving in viral optical illusion

Social media users have been left stumped by a mind-bending optical illusion - and it's causing quite the fiery debate.

The whole point of these puzzles is to confuse us and demonstrate how easily our eyes can be deceived, but this one has well and truly taken the biscuit.

Footage showing a horse trotting along a snow-sodden field has managed to keep a host of people up at night this week.

It can be seen slowly trotting along as it carefully navigates the white stuff which blankets the ground - but deciding which direction it's heading isn't as easy to discern.

A social media user uploaded the short clip to the 'confusing_perspective' Reddit thread alongside the caption: "Is it walking away or walking towards?"

It didn't take long for other people to share their thoughts on the optical illusion, but the thing is, no one could definitively agree on which way the horse was manoeuvring itself.

One said: "Took me a minute to see it walking towards, but it’s walking away for sure."

Another wrote: "That horse is walking towards where it wants to go!"

A third joked: "Of course it's walking toward, what a dumb question. Video restarts...oh."

And a fourth commented: "The last 1/4 of the clip makes it clear it's walking away. But it looks a lot like 'towards' in the first 3/4."

Others couldn't even pick a lane after watching the footage on repeat, with many saying that made it even harder to decide on the direction the animal was heading in.

"The more times I watched the video, the less I could tell what direction it was walking," a Reddit user chimed in. "This is a good one."

A second said: "Honestly had to look a couple of times to catch this one. And even after knowing it, my mind can trick me it’s walking the other way again."

A third then added: "This was good. I was sure it was away. Then it looped and I immediately was no longer sure lol."

However, there were a handful of people though who believed they had managed to crack the optical illusion after taking a closer look at the horse's feet.

One person remarked that between the movement of its hooves and 'the snow prints it leaves', they'd bet their life on the fact that 'it's walking away'.

Thankfully, the person who filmed the confusion-inducing footage has revealed the correct answer to this optical illusion.

Alesia Willard shot the video of her horse Rudnik last year, explaining she wanted to capture a clip which showed the incredible contrast between his dark coat and the white snow.

"I also realised that because he was so dark, it was hard to tell if he was coming or going in certain angles," she previously told Newsweek.

Turns out, the horse is walking away - which is great news for the guy who put his life on the fact that it was.