ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, March 1, 1996 TAG: 9603010014
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG
SOURCE: ELISSA MILENKY STAFF WRITER
Chickens across the country soon may be seeing red, and it all will be Blacksburg Vice Mayor Al Leighton's fault. Farmers, however, will not be crying fowl.
Leighton, who just retired from Virginia Tech's animal and poultry sciences department, has developed a contact lens for chickens that keeps them from fighting and literally cannibalizing each other. The plastic lens, which covers the chicken's entire eye, is red and therefore prevents them from seeing blood.
Chickens, Leighton explained, are naturally hyper, especially when they are packed into laying cages with up to 15 other birds. Seeing blood (often the result of a sharp peck) only makes the situation worse.
"It's like keeping 10 of us in an 8-by-8 room for a year," he said. "We wouldn't get along very well."
Leighton has been developing this lens - which, by the way, has nothing to do with far- or near-sighted chickens - since the early 1960s and even patented it in 1989. Now he is ready to test the lenses on birds throughout the country so he can market the product to farmers internationally through Animalens Inc., a small company he helped to form.
His goal is to put 600 million contact lenses on 300 million chickens - quite a serious proposition. But the sheer curiosity of a product referred to as a "contact lens for chickens" has not been lost on Leighton. On a box of promotional materials, a cheerful red sticker says, "what you see inside will make you laugh, then it will make you money."
Through the years, his project has caught the attention of multiple newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, and Leighton even has made appearances on television talk shows. Most recently, legendary Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko devoted an entire column to Leighton's contact lenses.
"People look at me and say, 'are you crazy?'" Leighton said with a smile.
The lenses, which costs about 15 cents a pair, are made with the same materials as human contacts, something Leighton is quick to point out.
"If humans are willing to have them in their eyes, it can't be so bad."
They are also easily popped in to the eyes of chickens, where they will stay for life. Chickens have nictitating membranes, which means the lenses never need to be removed for a cleaning. And presumably, you wouldn't hear the familiar "wait, I lost my contact, check the floor" routine.
The contact lenses also save farmers money, Leighton said. Calm chickens eat less food, don't kill each other and do not need their beaks trimmed. (Farmers trim the chickens' beaks to prevent injuries.)
"We know there's an economic value, there's a behavioral value, it reduces cannibalism," Leighton said. "But we know there's a selling job we need to do."
Once he sells the chicken lenses, Leighton plans to move on to other animals with, shall we say, behavior problems. Hogs are next in line.
"They chew each other's ears off ... all the time."
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Al Leighton invented these contact lenses, which helpby CNBkeep chickens from fighting. color.