“Chicken” will be the theme of this year’s Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony [tickets for the Ig Nobel ceremony go on sale today, August 1, 2007, from the Harvard Box Office]. In honor of the concept of Chicken, today we take a quick look at a little-celebrated aspect of chicken research:
In the 1950s, scientists discovered that red light soothes the savage chicken. Normally, when a beak battle draws blood, the sight of the gash causes other birds to gang up on the wounded party and peck it to death. In red light, the hens can’t see the blood, so they stay docile.
At first, farmers installed scarlet lightbulbs in chicken coops, but it was too dark for human workers. Next, someone invented red spectacles, but they kept falling off.
Now, Al T. Leighton, a former poultry sciences professor at Virginia Tech, has patented red contact lenses for chickens. So far, about 100,000 birds have tested the tiny plastic disks, Leighton says.
So says a May 6, 1997 Los Angeles Times article by Roy Rivenberg.