Wednesday 3 August 2011

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)

6 comments:

James C. Collier said...

Hi Andrew, if you don't mind I will fill in a few holes in your information. I worked with Randy back then running many research trials.
1) Free-range birds had the same pecking/mortality/cannibalism problem as caged birds, but with greater access to each other the problem could easily be worse. FR birds would also attack the people working in the coops (very annoying/distracting/dangerous re: equipment).
2) chickens are social and require closeness to other birds for best health measured by body weight, longevity and egg production. Four birds/cage seemed optimum.
3) IMHO the lenses could have ultimately worked, but Randy was impatient and insensitive (a human failing).
Thanks
JC

Andrew King said...

Hi James,

Perhaps I did over-simplify a bit, but even taking a more nuanced view, I'm still left with major concerns, both over stocking densities in current commercial poultry operations and with the whole concept of chicken contact lenses:

'chickens are social and require closeness to other birds for best health measured by body weight, longevity and egg production'

True, but slightly disingenous. Chickens are undoubtedly social and will flock / huddle together naturally. But even social creatures need a certain minimum amount of space if they're to avoid problems with hygene, disease and behaviour. Exactly how much space a chicken needs is a matter for debate, but some of the stocking densities allowed in comercial operations sound incredibly cramped to me. The UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs currently thinks it's OK to put up to nine laying hens in every square metre of available ground surface.

'Free-range birds had the same pecking/mortality/cannibalism problem as caged birds, but with greater access to each other the problem could easily be worse'

That's a surprising result and I'd need more information to make sense of it. For a start, what is free range? As I understand it USDA regulations don't specify how long poultry must have access to the outside, or lay down specific rules about the size or quality of the outside range. As compared with caged birds at what stocking density?

According to Inmaculada Estevez at the University of Maryland, who has concluded that high stocking densities can cause behavioural problems, there are at least two possible mechanisms for the effect she sees, one more important than the other:

The negative effects of increasing densities on the performance per bird are probably more closely related to a decline in environmental quality than to "social tension" problems.

I don't think overcrowding's a simple problem with a simple fix, but I do still think that a problem exists.

'IMHO the lenses could have ultimately worked, but Randy was impatient and insensitive (a human failing)'

They possibly could have worked, in the sense of reducing the pecking / cannibalism problem, but it's hardly an elegant solution, treating an intermittant but severe welfare problem with a cure that's practically guaranteed to cause its own welfare problems in the shape of the discomfort and pain the creatures will suffer from having foreign bodies introduced into their eyes over a long period.

Of all the things you could do to modify chicken behaviour, whilst improving or having a neutral effect on general welfare(e.g. looking at food and water access, controlling overall stocking density, looking at the optimum number of chickens per cage or enclosure, controlling lighting levels, temperature, humidity, etc, etc), the lenses seem, IHMO, like one of the least promising.

Thanbks for the information, but I'm still a long way from being convinced that the chicken contacts represent a net gain in animal welfare.

Regards

Andrew

Andrew King said...

Rats! That should have read 'disingenuous'. But you get the picture.

Unknown said...

Hello, my name is Josh Nunnelee and Randall Wise was my brother in law. While this post is rather old and I don't expect anyone to read it, I want to add a few comments. Randy was the most patient and sensitive person I've ever met and has inspired me in ways I cannot express since his passing in 2003. I feel that Randy was a true visionary and was way before his time in technology terms and I want to express that I will be following in his footsteps where he left off. I may be just as crazy as some of you feel Randy was but I see the need that Randy saw and am pursuing this dream to my full extent..

Andrew King said...

Obviously I didn't know Randy personally and wouldn't seek to contradict your assessment of his character.

But the idea of contact lenses for chickens still seems like a terrible one to me. The observation that changing the visual stimuli presented to birds can change their behaviour seems sound. But welfare problems from introducing foreign bodies into birds eyes on an industrial scale are entirely predictable and, sure enough, they actually happen when the idea is tried out for real.

Unknown said...

Josh, I knew Randy for a brief period - I did not know he'd passed away. How can I reach you to ask a few questions?