To stop cannibalism and prevent the loss of their valuable egg-laying hens, farmers routinely clipped off the tip of the bird’s beak, a reportedly painful process. In the 1940s, however, the National Band and Tag Company came up with a far more painless and fashion conscious method to deal with the problem of cannibalistic chickens. Their design team reasoned that if the birds couldn’t see “raw flesh or blood” then they wouldn’t cannibalize each other and so they came up with “Anti-pix”—mini sunglasses equipped with red celluloid lenses and aluminum frames.
