Animal Wars

It must be something about the autumn air… today I spied the chickens bullying the ‘nutty dog’ out of his favourite treat – a walnut. Our chocolate Labrador is truly a ‘fruit and nut case’, I’ve mentioned before his passion for picking fruit from the trees but he also is very partial to nuts and in particular walnuts. We have two huge walnut trees in the garden and he finds the nuts that fall from the tree, caries them carefully to a sunny spot and settles down to a little feast. He breaks open the shells with just enough force from his powerful jaw to crack the hard outer layer then opens them with great skill before extracting every particle of the tender and tasty nut inside, leaving just the clean shells. He does this with the precision of a skilled craftsman.

The ‘west highland witch’ often hangs around while he does this and cadges scraps off the bigger dog, her jaws are not powerful enough to crack the nuts so if she finds them she just carries them off and buries them in the garden… leading to an explosion of walnut seedlings all over the place! But now the ‘nutty dog’ is being hounded by the chickens too. Whenever he settles down to a walnut snack, up the garden they run at the first sound of a walnut shell crack and with no fear just peck the nuts out from under his nose….

However I think the chickens should take care… yesterday our two cats were sitting in the sunshine in front of the house when the chickens came to see if there was any spare bread or cake for their afternoon tea. Refined chickens we have… between 4 and 5pm they pop up to the house where they know there will be a cup tea for me and some scraps of something from the kitchen I’m likely to share with them. Anyway as they waddled and clucked their way up to the door, the cats sat there watching them and I swear I could hear what they were thinking…

The black cat sniffed towards the chicken and put her head on one side as if considering the possibilities ‘it smells like a bird’ she says… ‘it looks like a bird’ the tabby one agrees, ‘beak, feathers, funny skinny feet, stupid expression… bigger than normal though’. ‘Think we could take them?’ the black enquires … ‘definitely’ replies the tabby ‘if we worked together we could, pincer movement, divide and conquer…’ ‘Fancy a bit of fun’ says the black cat stretching her long body and clicking her neck on both sides like a thug. The tabby stretches out first one paw then the other, considers the warm afternoon scene before replying ‘bit warm today for chasing a stupid bird… besides it’s almost supper time, why get all hot and bothered when we can have it silver service?’ ‘Fair point’ says the black jumping onto the warm windowsill ‘I can wait…’ she purrs menacingly at the chickens…