Hypnotism's Weird History #4 - A U.S. Vice President Talked About Hypnotizing Chickens

Many mistakenly believe that former U.S. vice president Al Gore claimed he invented the internet when he really claimed he "took the initiative in creating the Internet".

He also once claimed he had hypnotized chickens. Well, maybe not explicitly but he seemed to have more than a pedestrian knowledge of the topic.

Strange as it seems Wikipedia has an entry about chicken hypnotism and Albert Arnold Gore Jr. is one of the notable people the entry associates with the topic.

The Wikipedia entry for chicken hypnotism also has a link in the references to an archived March 24, 2000 article in the Cincinnati Enquirer. The article describes the vice president at the time touring Sands Montessori Elementary School. It seemed to have been going uneventfully until a young student named Hessam Akhlaghpour said he had seen Gore on the C.B.S. 60 Minutes program telling the interviewer that the citizens of his home state of Tennessee would sometimes hypnotize chickens for entertainment. The student insisted on knowing how they hypnotized chickens.

The article gives the process Gore recounted as

• Hold a chicken's head on the ground.
• Using a finger or a stick draw circles around the chicken's head.

“He'll try to follow the stick and, in no time, he'll go 'cluck, cluck' and he's out.” The article attributed that quote to Al Gore.

There is no evidence that An Inconvenient Truth has subliminal messages. Would it be surprising though if it did? Maybe not.