What might you expect to see if you looked at the retina of this sweet little kitten, blind since the day it was rescued from the side of the road?
Here is the retina – really hyper-reflective, showing an early retinal degeneration, most probably inherited, like progressive retinal atrophy in the dog. We see this in Abyssinian cats both as a dominant early-onset disease (Curtis et al (1987) An early-onset retinal dystrophy with dominant inheritance in the Abyssinian cat. Clinical and pathological findings.
Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci. 28:131-9) and a recessive mutation in somewhat older animals (Narfstrom and Nillson (1987) Hereditary rod-cone degeneration in a strain of Abyssinian cats. Prog Clin Biol Res. 247:349-68) but also in Persians (Rah et al (2005) Early-onset, autosomal recessive, progressive retinal atrophy in Persian cats. Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci. 46:1742-7) and Siamese cats. Also from time to time it occurs sponteneously as in this kitten. Little Jasper will grow up used to its blindness and not, we presume, having many welfare implications of the disease.