My wife Deborah was using a website called Illustration Friday for inspiration and their topic of the week was "Chicken." I suggested that she draw a proud rooster in a military uniform as we are both fans of animals wearing people clothes. After deciding on the Civil War, the colonel became a strange, hybrid-fowl version of General Ambrose Burnside (the very namesake of the facial hair itself). After the war ended General Burnside became a Senator in his home state of Rhode Island. The decision to make the rooster a Rhode Island Red came easily.
