Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand, marketing tools that get your products out there. Integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time. From startups to scaleups, in-person, and on the go. Shopify's made for

entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. Hello and welcome to Tales from Titchmarsh, a wry look at life over the garden fence with me, Alan Titchmarsh.

This time, why chickens aren't always as innocent as they seem?

My dreams of becoming Lord Emsworth, from P.G. Woodhouse's Blandings Castle castle novels have been on hold for some time now.

Lord Emsworth, you may recall, had a voluptuous sow by the name of Empress of Blandings,

who'd won the silver medal in the Fat Pigs class at the Shropshire Agricultural Show,

three years running. His lordship enjoyed nothing more than leaning over the railing of the

Empress's sty and offering her a tasty boiled potato, sighing contentedly, as the Porcine

Amazon put it away as part of the 5,700 calories she needed to consume every day in order to maintain her impressive physique.

But my livestock ambitions are confined as yet to chickens, which I've kept for 30 years or more.

They're not the same chickens I began with back in the 1980s, but one or two of them, diminutive Lavin de Pekins with feathered feet,

have been around for a good eight years at least.

They don't lay any more, but I don't have the heart to dispatch them.

Like Lord Emsworth, I'm a bit soft about my livestock.

I do not, as he did, spend every waking hour reading whiffle on the care

of the pig, or even waffle on the care of the chicken, but the other hens give me delicious

orange-yoked eggs for my weekend breakfasts, even if their characters make them less endearing

than the contented sow. Chickens are, almost without exception, nasty pieces of work.

Life has taught them that unless they arrive at the feeder first,

their companions will have polished off breakfast, lunch and dinner.

As a result, the pecking order comes into play,

and this one will see off that one with a flutter of wings and a warning squawk.

...