Persistent Mr Fox

Flying out the conservatory double doors barefoot, dressing gown bellowing in the wind, with a wild crazy look in my eye as I grab a suitably long stick, I precede to shout and yell at a shabby looking mange riddled animal as it plays peek-a-boo round either side of my dilapidated shed. With a scratch and a scuttle it eventually vaults over the rotten back garden fence and disappears into a neighbour’s garden.

Breathless I stand for a moment, ankle deep in thistles and stinging nettles still stuck to the flesh on my legs. Dejected I turn to leave, he’ll be back- he always comes back. Looking up, I noticing my 65yo Irish/ Catholic neighbour watching me somewhat perturbed and perplexed from her bedroom window. It’s then that I realise the belt to my dressing gown has unwound and in my haste to chase the fox out of our garden for the third time in as many days, and that I neglected to put any underwear on this morning. Inside the Rabbit hutch further up the garden, Dawn thumps the floor of her wooden cage mockingly, thanks, I think. Remind me not to try and save from the fox again.

Don’t misconstrue my maniacal moment of madness for a beastly being beater. No, I for one have always been fervent a supporter of animal welfare. For most of my childhood and teens I’ve been fortunate enough to live where local wild life, including Foxes, are regularly seen. My mother would leave peanuts and out-of-date dog food for badgers and foxes in the evenings, and the pair of us would stretch out on loungers under thick tattered tartan blankets and wait for them to come into the garden so we could watch them. While some may say this is unfair to the animals, making them used to human contact and therefore making them too tame, not to mention artificially propping up an unsustainable fox population. I would like to add a lot of the food we put out was also laced with mange treatment.

The last few weeks have been something of a problem for us, living in a more sub-urban area there just isn’t the space of local wild life to safely co-exist with humans. We have two Rabbits, Dawn and Dusk, my daughter loves them, and there is nothing I would hate more, then for my daughter to race down to the living room, open the curtains, and find her beloved ‘rawbits’ strewn in pieces all over the garden. We used to leave them in their run, a sort of low metal circular fence; they ate the grass dug holes, and played all day in the sun and what not. But since having out regular guest, sometimes three times a day, they’ve been confined to their hutch, now a veritable Rabbit Alcatraz:

The other day my neighbour, the same one who saw me in the garden rang the doorbell, turns out the fox has been harassing other people down our street, even leaping into a child’s buggy. In these sort of situations, where a Fox can get too tame, like eighteen months ago on the news, a fox crept though a dog flap and mauled a six month old baby, the RSPCA has to step in. In many ways I sympathise with the fox, its scrawny and gaunt, tail almost completely bald, and obviously starving and desperate. Being trapped by the RSPCA would probably be a death sentence as such an animal would probably be too unhealthy to be rehomed, still, with an average life span of two years, perhaps this is the more humane solution…