If need be, however, rats will travel 300 feet or more daily to obtain their food and water. In urban areas most rats remain around the buildings and yards which provide their necessities, and unless they are disturbed, they do not move great distances. Rats have poor eyesight beyond three or four feet, relying more on their hearing and their excellent senses of smell, taste and touch. Norway rats are very sensitive to motion up to 30-50 feet away. They are considered essentially colorblind.
Rats use their keen sense of smell to locate food items and apparently to recognize other rats.
Norway rats rely on their sense of smell to recognize the odors of pathways, members of the opposite sex who are ready to mate, differentiate between members of their own colonies and strangers, and to tell if a stranger is a strong or weak individual. Norway rats use hearing to locate objects to within a few inches. Norway rats have a highly developed sense of touch due to very sensitive body hairs and whiskers which they use to explore their environment. Much of a rodent's movement in a familiar area relies heavily on the senses of touch and smell to direct it through time-tested movements learned by exploration and knowledge of its home range. Rodents prefer a stationary object on at least one side of them as they travel and thus commonly move along walls, a fact which is very useful when designing a control program.