It’s High in Protein and It’s, Um, Ostrich : Food: An Oklahoma farmer sticks his neck out at county fair to promote his birds as a low-cholesterol choice for health-conscious meat eaters.

Chuck the Ostrich stands 8 feet, 6 inches tall, runs at a 40-m.p.h. clip and can crane his elastic neck nearly 360 degrees.

But to Doug Stickler, who bused Chuck to the Los Angeles County Fair from his ostrich ranch in the Oklahoma Panhandle, the bird represents five pairs of supple boots, 100 pounds of costume feathers and $1,250 in choice filets.

Actually, Stickler probably wouldn’t grill 14-month-old Chuck, a gregarious avian with huge eyes and long lashes who has appeared on “Late Night With David Letterman.”

Stickler is, however, trying to persuade fair-goers that ostrich meat--low in cholesterol, high in protein--is the health food of the ‘90s.

“Well, why not?” he said the other day in the livestock building of the Pomona Fairplex, where he, Chuck and the world’s largest county fair will remain until Sept. 30. “We eat snails, don’t we?”

Ostrich--sauteed, broiled, stewed or fried--tastes a lot like beef, said Stickler, 29, a rotund man with a freezer full of ostrich steaks back home. The meat is red, very lean, with the texture of veal, and can fetch as much as $10 a pound.

Although their hides and plumes are commonly used in clothing and leather goods, ostrich meat still is available in only a few specialty shops and “white-tablecloth, la-de-da-type” restaurants, Stickler said.

“But it won’t be long until you see people eating Kentucky Fried Ostrich,” he insisted. “It’s definitely the future.”

For fair-goers gathered around the pen where Chuck and his younger brother Andy were prancing on their two-toed legs, flapping their useless wings and making throaty gurgles, there was no rush.

“Eat their meat?” said an incredulous Mario Segura, 19, of Los Angeles, eyeing an ostrich in person for the first time. “That’s cold.”

Ruth Williams of Monrovia was more willing to stick her neck out. “I’ll try anything at least once,” she said. “But I’m not sure I’d try it again.”

Stickler, who is on the road seven months a year preaching the gospel of the Struthio camelus (literally “camel bird”), decided to get into ostrich breeding one day in 1986 while shopping for boots with his brother. They found that cowhide sold for $70; ostrich went for $350.

“I decided I was in the wrong business,” said Stickler, who has an ag-business degree from Abilene Christian University in Texas and was managing a feedlot at the time.

He bought his first birds from a sect of ostrich-farming monks in Oklahoma City. Since then, he says, he has sold more than 300 chicks around the country at prices ranging from $500 to $3,000.

Most ostrich products still are imported from South Africa, where ranchers have held a virtual monopoly on the bird for 100 years. But there are already more than 5,000 ostriches being bred in the United States, and a population of 75,000 to 100,000 is expected by the mid-1990s, the American Ostrich Assn. says.

Stickler, who crisscrosses the country with his flock of four in a 48-foot-long trailer, is convinced that the industry will fly--even if the birds can’t.

“It won’t be long until you go out on the plains and you see more ostriches than you do cattle,” he said. “People are getting used to eating exotic meats.”