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.

Feed me, or I'll trample on your wellies.

There's a few things you should know about training chickens. Firstly, they will train you far quicker than you will train them. Second, they rank only behind dogs for their ability to employ cuteness and persistence to extract food from you. Within days your chickens will have trained you to fulfil their every whim.

For example, when we got our first two girls, and introduced them to their new home including a lovingly hand made perch my husband had toiled over for hours, sanding away any risk of splinters, checking heights, sturdiness, aesthetics, and not without some DIY related personal injury and quite a bit of swearing, they refused to perch.

So we provided bedding on the floor, and it being the first night, that comprised part of an old duvet (so their little bottom's didn't get cold on the floor) and so it went on until we installed a ramp so they didn't have to make an effort to jump the four inches to the perch itself.

And then there is feeding time. All the girls have worked out that if they rush me, stand on my wellies and prevent me from moving, I'm more likely to distract them with corn so I can make my way to top up their feeder.

And woe betide if you don't play ball. I once lost part of an earlobe to Beastie who, enraged that I was hand feeding Hoppy in my arms, launched herself onto my shoulder and proceeded to clamp her beak onto my ear and attempt to tug it off whilst squawking loudly into my ear through her still clamped beak.

So how do you train chickens better than they can train you ?

Moody Broody

I have just taken into protective custody a neighbours broody hen and her last remaining chick from a brood of eight, the remainder being picked off, one by one, by an unknown chick thief to sadly be gobbled up. Now the broody and her adorable week old chick were in dire need of help, but you try explaining that to a chicken.

Having trained my own chickens to 'come here', 'go there', 'not that way', 'stand still and let me pick you up so I can cuddle you' I had forgotten just how difficult a wilful chicken can be.

Firstly it, in order to deploy the vital trick of waiting until they'd gone to bed to catch them, I had to hang around the chicken coop for an hour before dusk to make sure the chick thief didn't get there before I did. Once the pop hole was closed I had to climb into a very small and smelly coop and close the door behind me and whilst sitting cross legged on poop in a too small space, try to snatch up a small and astonishingly fast chick amidst the squawking and flapping of half a dozen chickens and a cockerel who were non too pleased to see me in their bedroom and an outraged broody.

Once the chick was installed in my pocket and the broody held firmly in my arms (squawking as though I was murdering her) I put them both in a broody coop with my girls and hoped that tomorrow she wouldn't be as difficult.

So just how hard is it to train your chicken ?

Would you eat a battery hen egg ?

Pickle (above) has just had her third birthday with me. Of course, she doesn't look like this anymore. True, she still has a lampshade shaped comb, but aside from that you wouldn't recognise her with her plush brown feathers and her ruddy red comb.

I got her three years ago from the lovely people at the British Hen Welfare Trust www.bhwt.org.uk/and neither of us has looked back since. Nor have any of the other girls who've been rehomed with me over the years and have gone on to lead the sort of life I fantasise about: nice organic food and plenty of it, spring water, afternoon treats interspersed with bathing, preening, sunbathing, a regular pedicure and generally lolling about. What's not to love ?

Of course, it hasn't always been this way. Prior to rehoming, Pickle lived in a battery cage the size of a piece of A4 paper, she was pecked my her fellow inmates until she had no more feathers left. She arrived covered in septicleans due to injury and for weeks she screamed and ran whenever another chicken came near her. She is habitually greedy due, presumably, to having to eat what food was left when the dominant birds had finished and as a result on the first day of access to unlimited food filled her crop so full that it extended around her shoulder.

It begs the question. Would you eat an egg that came out of something that looked like this ?

Is it wise to keep your treasured chooks in your bathroom ?

The reason I ask is because I have three of them resident in the smallest room, only in my case, or rather that of my chickens, it's a rather spacious room, with a roll top bath and a heated towel rail which, naturally, I have to leave on to keep my darling chooks chooks warm, despite the fact that it's May.

The downside, and if you've ever kept chickens you'll know, is that they pooh. Rather alot. In fact what comes out seems wholly disproportionate to what goes in, and despite having a handsome WC, they seem oblivious to it's obvious benefits and prefer to redecorate the floor tiles in various shades of green and brown, which isn't so bad in daylight, one can navigate ones way to one's own ablutions without much of a mishap, only it does get slightly more hazardous at night as I have found out to my cost almost every night since they took up residence.

Can there be any more pampered ex-battery hens on the planet ?