- Magellan the first man to circumnavigate the globe? wrong.
- Baseball invented in America? wrong.
- Henry VIII had six wives? wrong!
The little factoid that caught my eye was the challenge to conventional wisdom that bulls are infuriated by the color red. Bulls are actually color-blind, and it's the movement of the bullfighter's cape the causes the bull to charge.
The animal that really reacts to the color red? Chickens!
Turns out that when a chicken bleeds, other chickens in the flock peck at it obsessively. If left unchecked, a flock can be depleted rather quickly as the chickens go at each other. Poultry farmers have a keen sensitivity to this, so they'll do what they can to prevent it. Enter a company called Animalens:
The traditional solution is to trim the chickens' beaks with a hot knife so they are blunt and cause less damage. However, in 1989 a company called Animalens launched red-tinted contact lenses for egg-laying chickens. The early results were promising -- because everything looked red, the chickens fought less and needed less feed because they wern't so active, but still laid the same number of eggs.Thus concludes another entry in Book of General Ignorance.
The egg industry operates on a tiny profit margin of about 1.6 percent. There are 250 million egg-layers in the United States, 150 milion of them on just fifty farms. Red contact lenses for chickens promised a tripling in profits.
Unfortunately, fitting the lenses was fiddly and labor-intensive. Deprived of oxygen, the chickens' eyes degenerated rapidly, causing pain and distress. Falling foul of the animal rights lobby, Animalens withdrew the product.
If you like this kind of stuff, there's over 250 pages of it to pour through. If you'd rather just know the answers to the teaser questions at the top of the post, they are: Henry the Black, England and two (four if you're Catholic). Want to know why? Get your own copy :^)