Hairless rats, and the breeding of them, is a hot button topic in the world of the rat fancy. I have seen few topics get as much attention, or provoke as much passion on either side of the debate.
It may seem strange to those outside of the UK that such a subject is so hotly debated, after all, it does only seem to be the UK that have such a strong opposition to the variety.

But this is because hairless rats have never been standardised in the UK, and thusly have never been allowed to be shown. The National Fancy Rat Society do not even allow people to bring hairless rats into the building of one of their shows, even as just a companion and not a show animal.
Perhaps partly as a result of this, most breeders have no interest in breeding hairless rats, and so they are quite rare in the UK, and a lot of people have never even seen one.

But where does this opposition to the variety come from, and is it justified?
Ask most opposers of hairless their reasons for opposing the variety, and you will almost certainly be told that they believe the rats to be unhealthy and, therefore, it is unfair to breed them.
But is there any truth in this? Are hairless rats any less robust than furred rats?
The simple answer to this is that, at this point in time, there is no solid proof either way.

The problem with trying to figure out whether hairless are unhealthy or not is that because of the low number of hairless rats in the UK, and the fact that no-one reputable is breeding them, any result we get is likely to be innaccurate.
This is because not only do we only have a very small population of hairless in general, but the ones we do have have not been bred by reputable breeders.
Putting a well bred, pedigree agouti with years of careful breeding behind it up against a pet shop hairless and trying to prove that this shows all hairless are unhealthy is deeply flawed. Of course hairless are going to be less healthy; no-one in the UK has ever attempted to change this through careful breeding, as we have with almost every other variety!

The problem is that because of the general dislike of hairless in the UK, the good breeders who are reputable and who work hard to improve rat health, do not make any attempts to work with hairless. Some breeders would like to, but are scared that they would be shunned by other breeders if they were found out.
Yes, its that much of a controversy.
The subject is actually controversial enough to make people scared that they would recieve abuse if they decided to breed hairless rats ethically.

Because no reputable, responsible breeders will touch hairless through fear or intimidation, the only people who are breeding them in the UK are pet shops and Back Yard Breeders hoping to make a quick profit on a 'novelty' rat.
It is not uncommon to see pet shops, or ads in the paper, selling hairless for £25 each. When you consider that a regular rat would cost somewhere between £5-10, you begin to wonder exactly what this large price tag is for.
And the price tag is purely because these rats are considered novelty pets.
It costs no more to breed a hairless than it does to breed any other variety of rat, and yet people can charge silly prices for them because the public are willing to pay it to have something unusual.

But the main point is that hairless are currently being bred solely by people who have no regard for health, longevity or temperament.
Therefore, the chances of hairless being unhealthy are much higher purely because they are not being bred responsibly by people who know what they are doing.
Any rat, hairless or otherwise, that is bred by such people would likely not be the healthiest of specimins.
So claiming hairless rats are unhealthy is rather unfair when you consider that they have never been allowed to opportunity to be anything else! If all the furred rats were only bred by pet shops or back yard breeders, we would see an increase in unhealthy furred rats too.

Hairless could have the potential to be just as robust as their furry counterparts, but we will never know this unless someone reputable who has rat welfare as their priority attempts to breed them to a standard.

The most commonly cited health issue with hairless is the problem that some does cannot lactate. Thusly, they cannot feed their kittens, and the obvious result is dead litters.
This is clearly a valid concern; we certainly don't want this trait within the rat fancy.
But it is also a fact that not all hairless have this issue.
There are lines of hairless in the USA (where the variety is accepted and freely bred) that lactate normally, and there are certainly quite a few in the UK too otherwise we wouldn't have any hairless rats in the country!
The lactation issues among hairless are still very much an unknown quantity at this point in time. While we know for a fact that some hairless have this issue, it isn't known whether the issue is simply caused by that particular genetic line, or whether it is actually linked to the hairless gene itself.
And since there are thought to be several different genes that cause hairlessness, it becomes even more tricky to figure out.
Is the lactation issue something which can be bred out if worked on by a knowledable person?
Breeders in the USA who have actively bred for healthy, robust hairless for years claim that they have managed to breed out their health issues.
In the UK, we have yet to try.

The moral opposition comes when you consider that in order to try breeding hairless rats responsibly, you are running the risk of causing rats to suffer and die in the process.
Lets say that the attempts to breed out the lactation issue were failures, and we ended up with dead litters as a result. It is this fear that causes the opposers of the variety to maintain that we shouldn't even attempt to breed them responsibly, because even if it ended up eradicating the lactation issue, we could lose rats along the way, and to knowingly take that risk is unacceptable.
Although this is a valid concern, it is also a very hypocritical one.
In fact, the vast majority of arguments against hairless rats are somewhat hypocritical when taken apart.
We have a vast number of different rat varieties today.
If we are going to be completely purist, we would only ever breed agouti, and perhaps black.
Everything else is a mutation, in exactly the same way hairlessness is.
In coming up with any of the other rat varieties we have today, we took a risk in entering unknown territory. We were never to truly know what would happen if we tried to breed blues, or rexes, or albinos, and indeed there were several inherant health issues with some varieties in the early days.
Topaz rats, for example, had a tendancy toward blood disorders/platelet pool deficiency. Blue rats had a tendancy toward an alarming number of health issues including prolonged bleeding after an injury, poor immune function (which led to constant respiratory infections, skin infections, abscesses and ulcers), early-onset tumors, reproductive problems, failure to thrive, and early and unexpected death.
Blazed rats, or other high white rat varieties had a tendancy toward Megacolon
And yet none of these things stopped people from breeding these varieties.
In fact, if anything, it spurred them on to try and breed these health problems out so that the rats did not have to suffer them in future.
And with all these varieties, healthy lines are now commonplace.

For some people, the opposition to hairless rats is based less on the health issues and more on the welfare of the rat as an individual.
A lot of people seem to think that a rat without fur is going too far, and that being furless will directly impact on the animal's welfare in its day to day life, all just to cater to human whims about appearace.
However, these same people often have no qualms with the breeding of dumbos, rexes, pink eyed whites, and several other varieties which are also mutations that have yet to be conclusively proven to not be detrimental to the rat's welfare.

People will argue that a hairless rat has trouble communicating to other rats, since rats use their fur and whiskers to signal a lot of their emotions.
But what of the rex? He has curly fur, and short, curly whiskers. He cannot use his coat to communicate as effectively as a furred rat either.
What of the Pink Eyed White variety? Or any variety with pink eyes? Rats with pink eyes are more sensitive to light, and are thought to have much poorer eye-sight than dark eyed rats, even to the point where some are effectively blind.
But again, there is not even half as much opposition to the good old PEW as there is to the hairless.

Some people say that hairless rats will spend their whole life being very cold, or being covered in scratches and wounds due to having no hair to protect them.
Again, this has no basis in fact.
Many people, myself included, own hairless rats that live outside in the rat shed with all the others, and they do not seem to suffer in the cold any more than any other rat. The idea that a hairless rat needs to be sat beside a radiator all day in order to function is simply ridiculous.
A hairless needs no more than sufficiant bedding, and other rats to cuddle into to keep warm. And these requirements are no more than that of a furred rat!

All in all, the hairless, while rare in the UK, is starting to become more common.
As such, the very people who should not be breeding them, like the pet shops and back yard breeders, are the ones who are in complete control of the variety.
As rat lovers, we cannot sit by and ignore hairless and hope they go away, because they will not.
They are here to stay, for better or worse, and becoming more common every year.
So surely we have a duty to these animals to try and breed them properly, ethically, and remove any health problems that might be common with them? To not even try to improve the health and welfare of the variety seems, to me, to be cruel and irresponsible.

There are now a tiny amount of ethical, reputable breeders in the UK who are tentatively beginning to work on breeding healthy hairless. Hopefully this will be the start of a strong, healthy, robust, long-lived hairless rat population in the UK.
We owe it to this variety to help them, not shun them.