Pecking disorder

I generally admire people who tinker about and use their creativity to solve problems, and wish them well, even if their ideas don’t always work out. The world would be a poorer and duller place without them. Occasionally, though, somebody steps over the border between creative thinking territory into the district of “what the hell were you thinking?” Randall E Wise, CEO of Animalens Inc. of Massachusetts is one such:

Randy Wise's decision to sell contact lenses for chickens is not the result of a sudden impulse. He's been preparing for this since he was a teenager in California.

Back in the early 1960s, his father, a chicken rancher, got involved with a similar venture. The idea then was to reduce the cannibalism of egg-laying chickens with a lens that distorted their vision. The business flopped, but the goal -- improving the economics of egg production -- is something Wise didn't stop thinking about.

Where daddy’s distorting contact lenses had failed, Randy thought he could succeed with red-tinted chicken contacts:

Concept: Make and market red-tinted contact lenses for egg-laying chickens, altering their behaviour so they will fight less, eat less, and produce more eggs -- increasing egg-ranch profitability.

From a profile on the entrepreneurial web site Inc.com. It doesn’t take much imagination to work out that there’s a down side to this bright idea, especially if you’re a chicken. First off, the so-called “cannibalism” problem consists of the chickens’ “pecking order” getting out of hand and it’s generally a symptom that the birds are being kept in stressful or inhumane conditions. As the Poultry Site puts it:

Predisposing factors include overcrowding, excessive light intensity or variation (e.g. through shafts of light in the house), high temperatures, nutritional deficiencies, feed form (mash takes longer to consume than pellets), tenosynovitis and other diseases affecting mobility, boredom, and strain of bird.

So, it’s not the most elegant solution as (if it worked) it would only mitigate the damage caused by the conditions the chickens are kept in, rather than removing the factors cause chickens to get so stressed that they peck one another to death.

But it doesn’t work anyway . Here’s the full, sorry, story:

In the 1950s farmers noticed that the use of red lights in the henhouse tended to pacify the chickens, reduce their activity and hence minimize cannibalism. The explanation is that when a chicken only sees red, it can't see the blood on another chicken and hence will not engage in pecking. Unfortunately the light levels had to be so low that the personnel working in the coop could not see well enough to discharge their duties. There was brief attempt to outfit the chickens with red glasses, (more like goggles) but they tended to fall off or snag. In the 1960s a farmer by the name of Irvin Wise tried to use contact lenses for the first time to manipulate the chicken's vision to minimize pecking. Irvin's contacts were not red but blurred vision as empirical evidence had shown that birds with cataracts would not engage in pecking. The technology was not mature enough and the experiment failed as the chickens were either blinded by the contacts or the contacts would fall out too easily. Ten years years after, Irvin's son, Randall Wise, tries to revive his father's idea while he is attending Harvard Business School and even produces a case study around the concept but finds no venture capitalist that will fund his idea and goes into software development instead. He does very well at this and sells his company for a tidy sum to Lotus Development Corp. and having kept in touch all this time with the poultry industry, plows the profit into his new Chicken Contact Lens company AnimaLens.

Considering what had gone before, ranchers were sceptical in adopting the lenses, and time proved them right. Though the lenses fit much better and had less of a tendency to fall out, they were difficult to apply and still tended to blind the birds outright over time. The lenses were not gas permeable as soft contact lenses are, they interfered with the nictating membrane and combined with the ammonia gas generated by the urine from the massed chickens which is strong enough to corrode all metals but stainless steel would cause no end of pain for the birds. By the mid 90's the company had abandoned the product and the concept is pretty much abandoned now.

From Everything2.com.

Sometimes, I love it when a plan doesn’t come together. The photograph, by the way, is one of our newly acquired chickens (a Cotswold black tail)