CHICKEN HOUSE ATTACK

The competition between the beef and poultry industries has become a full-time marketing theme, but rarely has it become as personal as the “Whitefield Chicken House Attack,” aka the “Battle of the Bramer and the Broiler.”

It was a hot summer afternoon in Haskell County, Oklahoma. The foggers and cooling fans were going full blast in Jim’s twin five-hundred-foot-long chicken houses. “A wet chicken won’t die” is the motto of polloqueros down south.

Sniffin’ around the ten-foot-tall screen door at the south end of a chicken house was one of Jim’s seven-hundred-pound black Bramer-cross steers. Nibblin’ on the rice hull and litter, he pushed through the door, and it slapped shut behind him.

“Blackie” froze for an instant. He found himself in this high, long metal building filled with more suspended, humping, fizzing, spritzing, undulating, augering, grinding, whirring water pipes, feed lines, sprinkler heads, fans, braces, cables, hoses, and attending racket than the engine rooms of the Monitor and the Merrimac . . . not to mention the combined uproar of 25,000 startled chickens!

Blackie panicked, bore to the right, and headed down the east wall, leaping, smashing, and obliterating the watering and cooling system that hung below the three-foot level. Racing for the big door on the north end, he careened along, bending the galvanized automated five-hundred-foot-long feed line into a mangled horseshoe. Jim, astride his four-wheeler, had seen the steer enter. He was racing alongside the building watching the mayhem through the five-hundred-foot-long chicken wire–covered side window.

He screeched to a stop at the north door to open it and let Blackie escape . . . bad plan. Blackie saw him, turned back, and tried to jump out the side window. The long span of chicken wire allowed him to actually exit the building but sprang him back like a trampoline into the pipes and feeders on the west side. Down the wall he went, demolishing everything in his path until he stopped midbarn to consider.

Jim four-wheeled it back to the south side door, propped it open, and strode into the melee. Blackie pawed the ground. Feathers fluttered and litter flew. He charged. Jim, thinking quickly, reached down and armed himself with two stompedflat chicken carcasses. Grasping their feet, he wielded them like a sword and a mace. Much noise ensued as hair and feathers flew, but Jim prevailed and Blackie hightailed into a brush pile a hundred feet away.

Jim looked over his shoulder, back into the Titanic. There they were—24,998 chickens pecking through the wreckage as if nothing had happened. He looked back to the brush pile. Blackie glared, shook his head, and snorted fluff like a busted pillowcase. And though Blackie never came near the chicken house again, Jim said he could track him in the woods for days. He’d swallowed so many feathers that his cow pies nestled in the grass like big doilies on the back of Grandma’s lime-green sofa.