Alfie's spitting feathers.

This post carries a warning for anyone who keep hens - you might not want to read on!

As some of you may or may not know we still have our old house in Lincolnshire and spend most of our time commuting back and forth to Snowdonia and camping out at Plas y Nant whilst all the renovation work is being done. Anyway last weekend we were back in Lincolnshire and David decided to take the three dogs out for a jog as usual. Now our part of Lincolnshire is very, very flat - the complete opposite of Snowdonia - and we are surrounded by free range chicken farms. All was going well on the jog until David noticed that the laces on his trainers needed tightening. He bent down to sort this out, stood back up again and heard an almighty racket coming from the direction of one of the chicken farms. He had a quick glance round and realised that he was one dog short, that dog being the notorious Alfie. His first thought was to just jog on but then thought better of it, turned round and headed back to the chicken farm yelling "Alfie" at the top of his voice. As he got nearer he saw that Alfie had jumped over the electric fence, which was obviously just designed to keep hens in and not Alfredos out, and was charging round the field grabbing at the hens behinds and pulling out their feathers. David tied the other two innocent dogs up and jumped into the field chasing after Alfie who had now decided to forget all his recall training and was just zig-zagging through the hens, spitting out feathers as he went. The hens by now were making a horrendous racket and flapping about all over the place with poor David charging through them desperately trying to round up the lunatic boxer. He eventually managed to catch him just as Alf was trying to negotiate the small opening into the hen shed - I dread to think what would have happened if he had got in there - and suffice to say he did get a bit of a telling off.

I would like to end this post by saying that no hens were hurt during the incident - but it would be wrong to lie, and I am genuinely sorry for what he did and believe me, he won't be doing it again.