# How do I know if my hairless rats are blind?



## zombie girl (Aug 17, 2013)

I got two young hairless rats at a pet store we passed by. They aren't social because they'd just arrived along with a couple litters of normal rats and haven't really been handled. Nothing I can't work with. They'll eventually have to get used to me touching them. Brother and sister rats (yes I've separated them. Boy is with my boys and girl is with my girls).
Alright then, my question!
How do I know if they are blind? Their moving behavior is a little odd. I haven't seen these movements in my other rats. They slowly sway their heads. They adjust their ears to sounds more than they look around. They jolt away with the slightest touch of my hand; they just run in any direction and it almost seems aimless. I get a 'staring off into space' vibe from them when I look at them. They could just be very scared but I feel there's a big possibility that they are blind.
Their eyes are a bright pink/red. There's more pink to their eyes than red.


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## Chuck (Jul 15, 2013)

Rats with pink eyes have poorer eyesight than blacked rats. All of the behavior you have describe sound like a rat with poor eyesight.


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## zombie girl (Aug 17, 2013)

Oh alright.


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## JBird (May 23, 2013)

Sounds like they may be either blind or have very poor eyesight. My PEW girls sway their heads due to their poor eyesight but still do seem able to see. They happily chase things and run around the cage safely. If your new babies are blind/mostly blind, I'm sure they will get on just fine  it may just take them some time to adjust to being touched and so on. 

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## zombie girl (Aug 17, 2013)

JBird said:


> Sounds like they may be either blind or have very poor eyesight. My PEW girls sway their heads due to their poor eyesight but still do seem able to see. They happily chase things and run around the cage safely. If your new babies are blind/mostly blind, I'm sure they will get on just fine  it may just take them some time to adjust to being touched and so on.
> 
> Sent from Petguide.com Free App


Thank you.  I will just keep an eye on them. They are sooo cute!


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## Rat Daddy (Sep 25, 2011)

First whether they are blind or not, keep them out of bright light. Pink eyed rats can get eye damage from being in too bright light for too long.

Second, blind or nearsighted rats will hug walls and just about never cross a room. They navigate by their whiskers and build an amazingly detailed spacial construct of their environment in their minds. Fuzzy Rat, our true shoulder rat could navigate her way home from a park nearly a half mile away from the house, and I'm talking about right up the front stairs and to the correct side of the door. As she got older, she even learned to calculate short cuts across territories she was unfamiliar with. Fuzzy Rat had remarkable eyesight and could navigate by distant land marks and recognize people from far away, but it's the same spacial skills that blind rats use to navigate your home. Also most rats will follow treats, a rat that can see well will follow a treat all over the place just by watching you move it from hand to hand or place to place. Blind rats pretty much run a search pattern looking for food based on smell. That's not to say that all rats have the same keen sense of smell.... Fuzzy Rat could smell food from two rooms away and her nose would get her to within a few inches of the food in moments, but when she got too close she couldn't locate the food by smell anymore and had to search visually the last few inches. Other rats I've had need to be within several feet from the food to smell it, but when they get close their nose will take them directly on target. So rats can either have very sensitive or basic senses or smell too. 

A real test of a rats eyesight, and I found this out quite by accident, was when I put Fuzzy Rat on a table and stashed food all around the room while she and Amelia watched. I put them on the floor and Fuzzy Rat followed the exact pattern I used to lay down the food and went precisely to each tasty treat in the exact order I stashed them... Amelia smelled the food and started to run a search pattern, she wound up with nothing... So I put the food up higher where the older and fatter Fuzzy Rat could not reach it to give Amelia a chance... So Amelia climbed up and got the food she smelled and ran under the radiator to hide it and the ran off to get more... Fuzzy Rat saw this and secreted herself under the radiator and picked off each treat as soon as Amelia stashed it... Again Amelia got skunked. Smart rats with keen senses will blow the doors off of normal rats in just about every test you try. 

I hope this gives you a few ideas for tests of your own, it really is easy to know if your rats are blind or visually handicapped.

If your new rats are blind or handicapped... first you should talk to them so they know your voice, then let them sniff you before picking them up... this way they won't freak out and bite you by accident.

Rats with poor vision also need to be kept indoors and handled in spaces where there isn't too much movement. Rats with poor vision can often see movement and as they can't tell what it is, they will freak out very easily.

I don't know if this is a rule, but Fuzzy Rat always looked like her eyes were partially closed, almost like she was squinting, most rats I've had looked a lot more bug eyed. I don't know if this was a focusing technique or something normal to some rats and not others. But keeping her eyes partially closed, gave her the facial expression of a happy puppy and strangers automatically liked her.


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