He came to the attention of the animal rights movement while at Oxford University in the 1980s, when he carried out research into amblyopia and strabismus, conducting experiments that involved sewing kittens' eyelids shut from birth in order to study the development of their visual cortex. Blakemore has said of the research that it was directly applicable to humans, and that "hanks to it, and similar research, we now know why conditions like amblyopia – the most common form of child blindness – occur and are now able to tackle it and think of ways of preventing it."