Charmed life for a chicken

If you were a chicken, you could do a lot worse than reside at one of Tom Whiting's four chicken ranches near Delta. First, you wouldn't be just any chicken if you were hatched at Whiting Farms.

You would be a blue-blood chicken, possibly one with lavender feathers. Or white, badger, brown or one of several coveted shades of dun gray. Your first home would be a plush, odor-free barn sequestered in the center of a 5,000-acre ranch in adobe hill country near the Uncompahgre River.

And you would be treated like nobility. As a chick you would run free on a carpet of wood chips in a temperature-controlled, humidified atmosphere. You and your siblings would receive a diet fit for chicken kings and lots of clean water.

You would be guarded by a professional security system. The few human workers allowed to enter your abode would be required to shower first to protect you from diseases.

"We pamper our birds," Tom Whiting said as he strolled through a 260-foot barn full of stampeding 6-day-old chicks. "They probably have five times the square area of most chickens."

The chickens live about six times longer than chickens raised for consumption. The usual life span of a Whitings Farm bird is 45 weeks, compared with six to eight weeks for typical fryers.

The oldest chicken in his collection outsmarted everyone through a fluke of genetics. Henry, also known as The Colonel, has been as naked as a jaybird since he was hatched six years ago. The Colonel enjoys a spacious cardboard box apartment in Whiting's production plant, where he crows harmony with Mexican radio tunes.

"Yeah, we were bound to have some mutation," said Whiting, who keeps the plump roaster around as a mascot. "He's mean, but he's not embarrassed. He's the only safe chicken in the place."

Living space for the others tightens up after they begin to feather out. Hackle roosters spend 30 weeks, most of their lives, in private cages to prevent them from fighting or otherwise ruffling their valuable feathers. The cages are stacked like high-rise apartments in 420-foot rooster barns.

Each bird is inspected for the quality of its hackle, and only a tenth of one percent are selected as future brood stock. The rest are euthanized painlessly with carbon dioxide, and their pelts begin the trek through stages of skinning, trimming, washing, drying, selection and packaging that leads ultimately to streams, lakes, oceans and memorable fishing trips.

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