All you folks out there with the skills to Google things do this for me.

First Google "cows wearing glasses" then Google "pigs wearing glasses" finally, try "chickens wearing glasses."

You'll notice on the first two searches you got silly cartoon pictures of barnyard animals in spectacles. On the third you got an actual serious story about chickens wearing glasses. They actually made little rose-colored glasses back in the early 20th Century to keep chickens from pecking each other to death.

The tinted glasses would keep chickens from noticing red blood on another fowl and keep the natural instinct to attack the bleeding one.

Farmers back then claimed the glasses could cut their losses by 5 percent. To a chicken rancher that's not chicken feed.

It seems that chickens are kind of cannibalistic and if they see blood on another chicken they'll peck the fellow pecker to death.

Now I may have once known this fact about the rose-colored chicken glasses but it took being reminded recently by my good friend Alan Muffcast to bring it back into the trivia banks of my small brain.

I wrote stories about fighting roosters and in researching them I learned about the gaffs that get fastened to some fighting roosters. I was told that two roosters will naturally fight each other, sometimes to the death.

I guess I never connected rose-colored glasses with the chickens we had on the farm growing up because none of ours ever wore glasses. We also never kept more than one rooster around either.

I do remember a time as a youngster being terrified that I would get chickenpox from going in the hen house. Once I was over that fear I couldn't bring myself to reach under that setting hen and get her eggs. I was pretty sure she would peck me in the eye if I did.

Therefore, I usually employed the "scare with loud noises" or poke 'em with a long stick" method of removing the old biddies from their cache.

Believe me when I say you don't want the lady who owns the chickens, whether you call her mother or grandmother, to catch you applying those egg gathering tactics. Rose-colored glasses would never stop her from murdering you.

Yeah, little chicks are cute when they're just hatched, at least after they get their down dry and all fluffed up. But mostly chickens are mean and nasty creatures. As a boy their highest and best use was for roping practice and testing out the design of a new trap.

If I made like John Conlee and donned my very own set of rose-colored glasses I might find a little to like about chickens. They are tasty when fried, baked or grilled and Mike the Headless Chicken was an inspiration to us all.

Go back and Google that one while you're at it.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at: karlterry@yucca.net