Animal color vision
Short answer
Rabbits and bunnies are dichromats with two cone types, one blue-sensitive and one green-sensitive. They see blues and greens but cannot see red as a distinct color, and their eyes favor dusk vision over color.
In detail
The rabbit retina carries two cone types, a short-wavelength (blue) cone peaking near 425 nm and a middle-wavelength (green) cone near 523 nm, and behavioral testing in the 1970s showed rabbits can discriminate wavelengths across that range. That makes a bunny red-green color blind by human standards but not blind to color.
What they lack is any long-wavelength cone, so red is not a separate color to a rabbit. Most of a rabbit's retina is rods, its eyes sit high on the sides of its head for a nearly complete field of view, and it is built for spotting a hawk at dusk rather than telling a red berry from a green leaf.
Rabbits carry 2 cone classes to our three. The missing long-wavelength class is what turns red, orange and green into one axis for the animal.
| Cone class | Rabbit | Human |
|---|---|---|
| S (blue cone) | ~425 nm | Nearest: S cone ~420 nm |
| M (green cone) | ~523 nm | Nearest: M cone ~530 nm |
Rabbits see blues and greens. Immunocytochemical mapping of the rabbit retina identified two cone classes: a middle-wavelength (green-sensitive) cone that dominates most of the retina, including the horizontal visual streak, and a short-wavelength (blue-sensitive) cone. Behavioral work going back to Nuboer's 1971 spectral discrimination experiments showed that rabbits can tell wavelengths apart in this range, which means they have real, if limited, color vision rather than none.
There is no long-wavelength cone. Red light is absorbed weakly by the green cone, so a rabbit registers a red object as something dark rather than as a color of its own, and cannot separate it from a dark green or brown of similar brightness. The practical result is a two-color world in which blue and green are the anchors and everything else is a shade between or beside them.
The rabbit retina has an unusual feature. The lowest five to six percent of its area contains no green cones at all and a high density of blue cones, an arrangement the Lund researchers who mapped it named the blue streak. Because the eye's optics invert the image, the lower retina looks at the sky. One plausible reading, still unconfirmed, is that a blue-only strip pointed upward is well suited to detecting a dark shape crossing a bright sky — exactly the silhouette of a hawk.
Whether or not that is its purpose, it shows how differently a prey animal's retina is organized from ours. Humans concentrate cones of all three types in a central fovea for detail; rabbits spread a green-cone streak along the horizon for scanning and reserve a blue field for the sky.
A rabbit's eyes are large, sit high on the sides of the skull, and bulge slightly outward. Together the two eyes cover close to 360 degrees, with only a small blind spot directly in front of the nose and a narrow one behind the head. The cost is a small zone of binocular overlap, so depth perception in front of the face is poor, which is why a rabbit sniffs or feels for food it cannot quite see.
The retina is dominated by rods and has no fovea. Rabbits are crepuscular, most active at dawn and dusk, and their vision is tuned for those light levels: sensitive to movement and contrast, poor at fine detail, and only modestly interested in color. In bright daylight they see less sharply than we do; in the half-light of a field at dusk they see far more.
The closest human analogue is protanopia, the form of red-green color blindness in which the L cone is missing and vision runs on S and M cones alone. That is the rabbit's normal complement, so the palette above is rendered with the protan simulation. As with every dichromat on this site, the model shows which color differences disappear; it does not claim to show what a rabbit experiences.
For a person, the same two-cone arrangement is a deficiency only because the world around them was designed by trichromats. For a rabbit it is simply how vision works, and the rest of the animal's senses — hearing and smell especially — carry the load that color cannot.
The rabbit's column above is close to what a person with red-green color blindness sees. The free color blind test takes about two minutes and estimates whether you have a red-green deficiency and which type.
Screening only — results estimate color vision on an uncalibrated screen and are not a diagnosis.
Animal color vision
The full comparison table: dogs, cats, birds, fish and the mantis shrimp by cone count.
Are squirrels color blind?
A daytime rodent with a cone-rich retina and the same two-color world.
Types of color blindness
Dichromacy in humans: the condition most of these animals live with as normal.
Color blindness simulator
Run your own photo through the same Machado model used on this page.
Last reviewed September 12, 2026. Cone peak values are from electroretinogram or microspectrophotometry studies of the species named; behavioral claims are from the cited discrimination experiments. Simulations approximate the color differences lost, not the animal's experience.