New Zealand Red Buck gone BLIND!?!

The NZR buck my hubby bought me - with two does - has been living with teh chickens. After about a month of chicken life he was blind in one eye one morning. No damage visible to the eye, just a chalk white-blueish color.

His does were digging burrows by then so I caged them up but left him loose.

This week his other eye is chalk white with a bluish cast.

So he is now miserable in a cage. At least he can get to his food and water with ease but he is mortal afraid of people so its only a stop gap till I can build him a large ground cage.

Has anyone heard of blindness in NZ rabbits? Or know what would blind a rabbit with no damage to the outside of the eye?

I was kicking myself and blaming myself for his blindness being caused by a chicken but having had over 20 rabbits with the same chickens and no damage to the eye itself, I have taken myself off the hook and stopped thinking it was a chicken.

But if its genetic I dont want to breed him!!! So being able to find what has caused it is rather important.

Here are some pickies, just to help.



Th left eye, was fine last week.



The right eye, first to go blind.



The entire rabbit. He presses himself so hard into that position when he saw and now hears, people, that he has a slight twist to his neck. I think he has spent most of his life in that position.

The thing it reminds me of is when one of our guinea pigs got cataracts - one eye first then the other. He didn't seem unhappy (and in fact he became more sociable because he had always been afraid of humans, but tolerated us more when he couldn't see us!!) The other guinea seemed to organise him! We no longer have him, not because of the blindness, but because he had other problems and had to be put down.

Dandelion wrote:The thing it reminds me of is when one of our guinea pigs got cataracts - one eye first then the other. He didn't seem unhappy (and in fact he became more sociable because he had always been afraid of humans, but tolerated us more when he couldn't see us!!) The other guinea seemed to organise him! We no longer have him, not because of the blindness, but because he had other problems and had to be put down.

How fast did the cateracts form?

I dont look that closely to all teh rabbits every day but his blindness was very very fast.

I can't remember how fast it was, but presumably the guinea must have been losing his sight before I could actually the see the effect of the cataracts. The vet took a look, and said that as long as the guinea was happy and healthy, he had good quality of life and it was no reason to take any action. (You can probably get ops to remove cataracts from animals, but I didn't consider that an option.)

I showed your photos to Mrs C-H, who is (maybe was) an optometrist, but obviously for humans not rabbits. She wondered whether the cloudiness visible is through the pupil, or whether the cornea is all fogged. It is hard to tell what is the edge of the pupil from the photos and neither of us are experts on rabbit anatomy ! Cataracts are not normally a fast onset sort of thing though.

The eye looks like a frosted glass marble. Cloudy all the way through. He is doing just fine. Was going to cull him but thought I might see how he gets on living with his two girls in the chicken pen. He gets around just fine and as the does have started digging I have my fingers crossed that we will get babies.

That will let me know if its genetic or something else and if its not something he can pass along to his offspring it will give me two lines to breed with and if he passes it to the kits I can eat them, blind or not and then get rid of the entire batch.

Win win really.