A farmer has gone to drastic lengths to prevent his poultry from falling in a foul mood.
The hens at Bulbourne Farm proved that going to all the trouble of doing a photo shoot with some ravishing roosters for a pin-up calendar to cheer them up is certainly worth it.
The calendar, called Nice Pecks, was produced by the Happy Egg Company and features images one would more likely see in a cheeky calendar featuring hunky men.
The pictures show poses which include cockerels lazing by a bath full of bubbles and surrounded by rose petals.
When the final 12 images, which were taken by fashion photographer Nathan Pask, were tested out on the hens in Tring, they gathered around and pecked at them.
Jean-Paul Michalski, who has been looking after hens for more than 26 years at the Bulbourne Farm, said: “We know that hens are calmer when they’re around cockerels but since we couldn’t bring in the real deal - because the eggs we buy in the supermarket are not fertilised - we knew we had to take a slightly alternative approach.
“Hens are actually very visual creatures so that’s when we decided to create the first ever cockerel calendar just for hens and see whether it made them happier.”
The 2013 calendar will be distributed to Happy Egg Company farms across the country.
The company will also be giving away thousands of calendars via its Facebook and Twitter pages where people can see a video of when the hens first came face to face with the heartthrob calendar.