Chicken’s got a champion in Georgia

Reporting from Augusta, Ga. â€”  One evening last spring, Chris Cunningham was sitting on his patio enjoying a cocktail and observing the state bird of Georgia, the brown thrasher. It was out in the yard doing whatever it is that thrashers do when Cunningham was seized by a thought.

“The brown thrasher hasn’t really done anything for Georgia,� he said to his wife. “But the chicken is huge.�

It has certainly been good to Cunningham.

He is the owner of Wife Saver Inc., a regional chain of family restaurants whose claim to fame -- aside from a name that is either chauvinistic or chivalric, depending on your perspective -- is its fried chicken box, a beloved culinary staple of football tailgaters and post-church suppers in this part of Georgia since the 1960s.

Today, thanks to a local ad agency that has turned his notion into a cheeky guerrilla PR push, Cunningham, 57, finds himself heading an effort to elevate the lowly chicken to state bird status and kick the thrasher to the curb.

Though only a few weeks old, the “Flip the Birds� campaign has already ruffled a few feathers with a slick website -- flipthebirds.com -- that mimics the cadences of hard-boiled politics: Videos depict the chicken amid swelling patriotic music, lauding it as a “Southern cultural icon and sustainer of Georgia’s economy.�

The thrasher, meanwhile, is derided as “inedible, lazy and migratory,� its image whomped with an all-caps stamp declaring it “WRONG FOR GEORGIA.�

It’s partly in good fun and partly a serious attempt to bring attention to the importance of the bird to Georgia, which produces more poultry than any other state. According to the University of Georgia, the industry sustains more than 100,000 jobs in the state. In 2006, its combined direct and indirect economic effect was $18.4 billion.

However, increases in the cost of grain, combined with the recession, have made the last year or so “the most challenging time in modern poultry history,� said Mike Giles, president of the Georgia Poultry Federation.

Cunningham has friends in all tiers of the chicken game, and he is concerned about their well being, as well as about the effects of criticism from animal advocates who deplore the mechanized realities of Big Chicken.

“I think PETA was all over KFC a while ago over the treatment of chickens and things,� he said. “I think the poultry industry should get a feather in their cap for what they do in the state of Georgia.�

There is no question that the chicken is tightly intertwined with the history and culture of the state.

In the 1870s, a writer for Harper’s magazine noted the unusual array of chicken dishes he was served at the home of Confederate Gen. James Longstreet of Gainesville: “It is doubtful if anywhere in the United States is the hen-coop so utilized as in north Georgia.�

Modern-day Atlanta harbors an unusual obsession with its homegrown Chick-fil-A restaurant chain; its ubiquitous billboards are to the Southern metropolis what images of Che Guevara are to Havana.

But that hasn’t guaranteed the embrace of Cunningham’s campaign by politicians -- or by poultry’s power elite. Gloria Frazier, a state representative from the Augusta area, said she received an e-mail from Flip the Birds urging her to introduce legislation, but she said she had more serious issues to tackle this session.

Giles of the poultry federation loved the website.

But he said he was worried about the way the online videos had, for comic effect, labeled as “radical� the Garden Club of Georgia, the group that urged the Legislature to adopt the thrasher as state bird in 1970. The deep-voiced announcer, in attack-ad fashion, says the group “managed to pull off one of the most shameful acts in our great state.�

richard.fausset@ latimes.com