Look at me again and I'll peck your eyes out

Do cats and chickens get on ?

Well in my case, no. Although not how you might think.

Buster is a fearsomely large ginger tom cat, the type that wrestles rabbits and magpies in through the cat flap (unfortunately only to let them go again, giving me the job of catching and evicting the damn things). But the one thing he's really scared of is chickens.

Now all chickens have a pecking order with the weakest chicken at the bottom, and my cat below that. My chickens appear not to have noticed that unlike them, my cat has teeth, and sharp pointy ones at that, nor that he has 20 needle sharp claws in competition with their 8 blunt ones.

The chicken in the picture is Pecky, shortly before she passed away and despite not feeling well, she savaged Buster moments after this picture was taken and he's never been the same again, so my cat generally gives them a wide berth.

Not so with my neighbour's dog, a 12 year old blind, deaf and arthritic terrier. Now being blind and deaf, Tilly's not much of a threat to my chooks. Except I overlooked two factors. Tilly is a terrier, and she still has a sense of smell. and it wasn't long before she had her jaws clamped onto the passing back end of a squawking Ellie.

Much to my embarrassment (and great pride), within seconds a vast flock of chickens had rushed to Ellie's aid and joined the fray and it wasn't without injury that I managed to extract a bewildered and slightly bloodied Tilly from a sea of squawking, pecking and whacking wings.

Tilly and Buster now give anything with wings a wide berth.