The Front Range has gone cuckoo for chickens.

The craze for hens can be explained in part by the local- food movement, which has inspired urbanites to grow and pickle their own cucumbers and carrots, to keep beehives back near the alley, and to make their own cheese out of local goat milk.

But the chicken trend is about more than eggs.

People are decorating their yards with elaborate coops, made to look like country cottages or adobe haciendas. They are naming their hens, hugging them, letting them strut about the inside the house.

In addition, as cities across the region pass laws allowing residents to keep the birds in backyards — Denver is considering a new chicken law now — the people who build coops, supply fowl, provide veterinary care and even slaughter the hens are getting lots of new business.

“When I started (in 2005) I would get a couple of calls a week about chickens,” said Kristy Pabilonia, a Colorado State University professor and veterinarian specializing in poultry. “Now we get at least five a day, sometimes 20. That’s been a challenge for us, to keep up with these calls.”

Calls used to come from people with experience raising poultry, often commercially. Now, most come from urbanites, people in Fort Collins, Longmont and Denver who, in many cases, have never owned a chicken.

Said Eric Fulenwider, who raises poultry for sale and builds coops for chicken-owners: “Over the last three years, business has boomed. It’s from every walk of life. From dreadlocks, peace-loving, very green people to an old couple that used to raise chickens when they were kids and they wanted to get back into it.”

To the new breed of chicken owner, the birds are more pets than food machines. They sing to the birds. They give them names like Buffy and Rosemary.

And when the birds’ egg production wanes, and eventually stops — the slowdown begins at about age 2 — urbanites tend to keep the hens.

Those who choose to have the chickens killed legally have often bonded so closely with their birds that they elect to be there for the procedure — a new twist for Doug Rice, the owner of Rocky Mountain Poultry Processing in Nunn, near the Wyoming border. It’s the only poultry-processing plant between the Front Range and Kansas, Rice said.

More than just food

“A lot of the backyard people face that dilemma — ‘What should we do with the hen when she’s no longer laying eggs?’ ” Rice said. “They were reluctant to bring their birds in here, the idea of killing what has become a family pet. Nearly every one of them has watched. It’s refreshing and interesting.”

Lance Rushton, who keeps chickens in his Highland yard, hasn’t had any of his hens slaughtered. But if he does, he wants to at least witness the death.

Otherwise, he said, “I feel I don’t have the justification to eat the meat.”

He wants to be there to “put the animal at ease. To thank them for their lives.”

Either way, most urbanites won’t opt to send Rosemary to the stew pot.

In fact, the new breed of poultry farmer even buys older chickens, ones past their egg-laying prime. In the past, so-called “spent” chickens were destined for the slaughterhouse.

Last month, Grant Family Farms, a free-range, organic chicken farm in Wellington, began selling, for cheap, older hens to people who have developed a certain fondness for chickens.

The farm adopts older chickens from much bigger organic egg operations. But eventually, those hens are too old for commercial egg production of any sort. So Grant Family Farms sells them to the public.

“Most of those birds go to making dog food. We’ll go ahead and bring in 5,000 chickens at a time,” said Sari Schauer, the meat and egg manager for Grant Family Farms. “We are rescuing them.”

Before the rise of the urban chicken movement, Schauer said, the farm would probably not find homes for their old hens.

The seven hens that have clucked their way around Ingrid Milinazzo’s Sloan’s Lake yard for two years are poised to find new coops. Milinazzo likes the birds, but their days of pumping out five or more eggs a week are drawing near. And Milinazzo got chickens in the first place for their little spheroids of protein.

Unlike many of her urban-farming compadres, she’s not emotionally vested in her birds.

“I don’t consider them pets,” she said. “They don’t have names.”

She has no problem with having the chickens slaughtered — she feeds her cats expensive raw rabbit meat, and figures ground-up chicken would appeal to them, as well. But she prefers finding a home for the hens.

Putting them out to pasture

She won’t let them go until this summer, when she will get a new batch of chicks, and already she is encountering people who will take them off her hands.

Chicken-keeping 101 Thinking of getting chickens? Here are some resources to get started. General information about raising chickens in cities: urbanchickens.org backyardchickens.com Check with your municipality for rules and regulations. Find a partial list of chicken laws in different cities: http://home.centurytel.net/thecitychicken/chickenlaws.html A local group that meets to chat about poultry issues: meetup.com/DenverBackyardPoultry Grant Farms’ Hen Again adoption program http://grantfarms.com/index.cfm/feature/55_16/hen-again–adopt-a-hen-program.cfm

None of the chickens owned by Teresa Redmond-Ott will ever become cat food or soup stock. The Fort Collins chicken lover has about 25 birds now and volunteers at Grant Family Farms to help with the new chicken-adoption program.

“They are snuggly cuddle-bugs,” she said. “The real-estate of my lap is prime, and they fight for it. They like to be under my arm. It’s so rewarding.”

Redmond-Ott routinely brings her hens to veterinarians — traditionally, sick hens quickly became, simply, dead hens. She doesn’t let them run around the inside of her house — some do, though, which has spawned the manufacture of chicken diapers — but she has constructed elaborate barriers between her chickens and hungry predators.

Whether they lay or not, chickens are good for yards, she said.

“They make wonderful compost,” she said. “They rototill the gardens. They eat weeds.”

Growing up in Northglenn, Sundari Kraft, the author of the upcoming “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Urban Homesteading,” had little experience with the grit of the farm.

“I knew nothing, man,” she said. “We had a cat and a dog. Suburban central.”

Now, the Denverite has seven chickens and a pair of dwarf dairy goats.

The growing menagerie demands attention — coop-cleaning, chicken-feeding, goat-milking — but she doesn’t mind, usually.

“Are there occasional mornings when I would rather stay in bed than go feed the chickens?” she said. “Sure.”

But slaughtering “is not on the table. It will not happen. Period.” She will nurture them until they die natural deaths.

“I hug them and snuggle with them before I put them to bed,” said Kraft, who lives in Northwest Denver. “What is that, other than ridiculous?”

Douglas Brown: 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com