If your child hankers after a chocolate animal this Easter, there's a veritable menagerie out there on the shelves.

YOU'VE heard of Easter chicks, and the Easter bunny.

But the Easter pig? The Easter teddy bear? The Easter cow? As Easter becomes less of a religious festival and more of a spring chocolatefest, the humble Easter egg has been transformed. Now they fill acres of supermarket shelves. Some of them have become enormous.

For adults, eggs come in huge sizes, packed with rich and luxury chocolates.

The biggest egg we found weighed four kilos and cost £99.99. Marks & Spencer have a larger-than-life-size chocolate bunny at £30.

Eggs for children aren't quite as excessive, but a simple egg is rare to find.

Once you were lucky to get an egg cup or a mug, but now eggs come with a range of extra goodies, from Subbuteo to sequinned purses, jewellery and Jenga games.

Chocolate shapes include enormous chocolate rabbits, endless chicks and ducks and just about any other animal.

We haven't yet found the Easter elephant, but feel it's probably out there somewhere.

OUR EASTER MENAGERIE The Lindt rabbit, a modern classic, around £3.

Dougal and other Magic Roundabout characters, £3.49 from Thorntons. Very appealing.

Marks & Spencer Dizzy Duckling £2.99.

Very silly.

Marks & Spencer chocolate duck 99p. A small treat.

Wonder Teddies, pack of three teddies containing a toy. 99p from Aldi.

Easter bunny and mini eggs. £1.19 from Lidl.

Strawberry-flavoured pig. £3.99 from Sainsburys. Sickly, but different Chocolate hen, £2.99, Sainsburys.

Mini bunnies with a tiny, cuddly toy.

£1.49 from Woolworths.

MORE EGG, LESS CHOCOLATE NOT every child likes chocolate that much. Many of them will already have far more than is good for them. So give them a different sort of egg.

Tin egg with a Faberge style design £5.75 from Bettys is filled with solid mini eggs but will last long after the chocolate has melted away.

Nestles Weebles, £3.99. Egg-shaped creature, weighted, so impossible to knock over. Contains one hollow egg.

We liked the Milky Bar Kid complete with cowboy hat.

KEEP THEM BUSY Let them work for their treats. There are a number of eggs available with kits to decorate the eggs yourselves.

Nicely messy - and whether you'd want to eat the results could well depend on who's done the decorating.

NESTLE EGG DECORATING KIT £3.98 Three eggs, but the "decorating kit" consists only of a set of Disney stickers to stick on the gold foil wrapping.

No mess. No fun. Boring.

SMARTIES EGG DECORATING KIT £2.98 One egg with a tube of Smarties and a tube of bright orange icing with which to stick them on. Fairly easy to write your own messages. Most of the Smarties got eaten before they could be stuck on.

LIR MAKE-YOUR-OWNEGG KIT £3.98 One egg, tube of yellow icing, packet of little jelly sweets and a big pack of hundreds and thousands with which to make multicoloured hair and beards. Hundreds and thousands made these wonderfully messy.

SHANNON DECORATE-YOUROWN EGG £1.99 One egg plus some midget gems, jelly foam eyes, jelly worms and a tube of red icing. Not the most obvious things for decoration really. Boys liked this one and when they'd finished, it looked scarily like something left over from Hallowe'en. What's more, they ate it.

BACK IN THE REAL WORLD, A CHICKEN OR AN EGG?

IN Britain we'll buy around 80 million Easter eggs this year and spend around £500 million doing so. The Salvation Army, and other charities, are hoping to persuade us to buy a few chickens as well.

For £6.50 you can buy a chicken for a Third World Family, giving them the chance of eggs to supplement their diet.

For £10, Farmfriend will supply a third world family with a brood of chickens and also send you - or the person on whose behalf you're buying - a little toy chicken, to get the message across.

£30 will provide a family of chickens - six chickens, a rooster, a pen and food for year.

www. salvationarmy. org. uk/ internationaldevelopment or www. farmfriends. org. uk