Quote Originally Posted by Rex_Tremende
Alfalfa was born blind; rather than put him down, we decided to keep him and raise him ourselves. It turned out his blindness wasn't much of a handicap - he just does things a little different than the others.
You reminded of of something I encountered this spring. I was at the Virginia Renassaince Faire and one exhibitor had alpacas. One of his older animals had been born deaf. He used this animal to train the young animals. The younger animals would look to the older one to know how to react to different situations. Because of the older animal's deafness, he often didn't react at all. Thus the younger animals were not jumpy all the time.