Friendly fox

[NickC]

While working in a garden the other morning - I suddenly realized I was being watched by a fox. After a couple of minutes I moved away from the machine and the fox appeared. I have never come across a wild animal as tame. The customer supplied a cup of tea and as a sat and ate my sandwich the fox got closer. With a little food offered it wasnt long before he came to take food from my hand. I guess a local must have been feeding him - has anybody else had a close encounter with a fox like this.

Nick

 

[pentrekeeper]

That has to be an urban fox, wild foxes in the countryside won't get within a country mile of human beings if they can help it.

 

[firecrest]

I was coming out of tescos once with a shopping bag and I saw a fox run out between two parked cars. In its jaws it was clutching a tescos bag. It stopped and stared for a second before hurrying off into the night , Id like to think it felt as embarrassed as I was to shopping at tescos and not the local shops.

 

[Matt Weir]

My Dad mentioned a 'tame' fox at a building site he recently visited but having experience of wild foxes he was reluctant to offer it a hand

 

[hedgepig]

When I lived in London I would see foxes at least a couple of times a week, but when I moved to the country it was more like a couple of times a year.

A year or two back I was standing at the end of the plaza in front of Edinburgh Castle taking photographs - a fox wandered nonchalantly up the steps next me, stopped right in front of me, looked at me and then wandered off. Had me chuckling all the way back to my hotel.

 

[Variant 13]

I've got a family living in my garden.

It's fantastic getting woken up at 3am by cubs chasing each other through the shrubs!

Though the crying during mating season is incredibly scary.

I've not managed to get them feeding from my hand but they seem to like me throwing food out of my bedroom window!

 

[Devon8822]

I would not have expected the people on bushcraftUK, to feed wild animals from your hands... are you aware of the harm that this can do to wild animals? Not all humans are going to be nice to them... and maybe next human encounter it will cost them their life. Seriously, theres no need to mess with nature, I know its nice to see/feed animals up close. In western Canada theres a problem with dear, caribou, and elk roaming the streets eating peoples garbages... because they know that humans are no threat, since people are constantly feeding the caribou with there hands. This is a huge problem. Anyways, I hope you people realize that... I try and just watch when I see wild animals, and if they get to close or in a situation like that sometimes I will scare them off so they don't get adjusted to humans.

 

[woof]

Well said Devon, watch them, photograph them, but ignore them!.

 

[Kepis]

That has to be an urban fox, wild foxes in the countryside won't get within a country mile of human beings if they can help it.

I live in the coutryside and had a fox crying under my window the other night, so i got up, carefully opened the cutrains a tad and just stood there leaning against the window sill watching it, only when it realaised it was being watched did it bolt faster than a 100m sprinter

 

[NickC]

to feed wild animals from your hands... are you aware of the harm that this can do to wild animals?

Fair comments - but this animal was already tame. The fox was only offered food after it came to me. I would also point out that when I noticed it the fox was within 10 feet of me working so was not bothered by large machinery ripping out a tree stump.

I can understand the problems in canada, but we dont have elk and moose etc and it is normal in the uk to see urban foxes - I have even seen urban badgers. Where should we draw the line about not feeding wild animal, in the UK you can often see people feeding wild bird, squirrels, hedgehogs. Even on my allotment I normally have a robin dancing round my feet looking for worms etc while I am digging. Everbody will have a view on this - I am not happy about my neighbour feeding wild birds in her garden as she never clears up the mess and this has encouraged rats, but due to the decline of british wild birds they sometimes need a little help.

Is there any difference between urban or rural animals? Are some animals acceptable and others not? Should we always keep our distance or is it OK to get close (whether feeding or not)?

Nick

 

[pentrekeeper]

Don't forget that in the wild animals, birds etc live by their wits, there is no or little society and no rules, they quite rightly see us as top preditor.
Foxes have a nasty streak in their nature thats why they are deemed vermin in the countryside.
Once I was talking to a farmer and he explained that two days before a cow had given birth in the night to a calf and that a fox had bitten one ear and half its nose off. The cow met the farmer in the morning very distressed, that night I stayed out and waited sure enough the fox came along and I killed it and left it at the farmers door so that he would see it was dead.
If a fox ever gets in a phesant pen it will kill as many as it can, fortunately I have only seen one example of this we picked up two sack fulls of dead birds and the ones that were still alive were very distressed.
I consider I am part of nature, it is cruel, every day animals and birds are killed but there is no remorse no concience thats just the way it is, survival of the fitest.
I've seen a buzzard kill a rabbit, the other rabbits dissapear for a while then come out again and carry on as if nothing has happened, thats how nature works.
The rules, regulations and laws demanded by the civilisation we live in are not part of nature and anyone that implies our own values, thoughts, morals to the wild creatures are hugely misguided and in my opinion stupid.
I bet that is going to get some feathers ruffled.

 

[widu13]

No apologies- I hunt. I kill pests and eat what I can, like rabbits etc. (It's organic and free!) On one of the farms where I shoot there was the usual incidents of mass slaughter of chickens and lambs. But one day I turned up to find they had shot 12 foxes in one night. One of their neighbours mentioned that they had seen the RSPCA releasing fox in his fields. He rang them and asked them where they had come from. The RSPCA went on the defensive stating that they were urban foxes and that there was no law to prevent them releasing them etc and the farmer just said, "No it's no problem I would just like you release some more" When he explained that he had shot them all within the same 1/4 mile radius of where they were released all sitting there looking at him.

I won't go into the morals of killing fox, just a cautionary tale. Fox have no place in human interaction and have been kept away from towns and cities for 100s of years. We now feed them and encourage them- why, for what purpose? There are now more fox in the UK than there ever has been. Encouraging them and feeding them will not help the fox population.

 

[firecrest]

There is no nasty streak in a fox, its a human projection., an anthropomorphisation. They have only instinctive mechanism. Moving animal - kill. They will kill every bird in a pen , not because they are nasty but because there has never been any reason for them to evolve a stop mechanism.

 

[firecrest]

No apologies- I hunt. I kill pests and eat what I can, like rabbits etc. (It's organic and free!) On one of the farms where I shoot there was the usual incidents of mass slaughter of chickens and lambs. But one day I turned up to find they had shot 12 foxes in one night. One of their neighbours mentioned that they had seen the RSPCA releasing fox in his fields. He rang them and asked them where they had come from. The RSPCA went on the defensive stating that they were urban foxes and that there was no law to prevent them releasing them etc and the farmer just said, "No it's no problem I would just like you release some more" When he explained that he had shot them all within the same 1/4 mile radius of where they were released all sitting there looking at him.

I won't go into the morals of killing fox, just a cautionary tale. Fox have no place in human interaction and have been kept away from towns and cities for 100s of years. We now feed them and encourage them- why, for what purpose? There are now more fox in the UK than there ever has been. Encouraging them and feeding them will not help the fox population.

sorry you just completely contradicted yourself!

Encouraging them will not help fox populations.....there are now more foxes in the UK than ever?

Foxes have kept out of towns and cities for hundreds of years because there was a better living to made in the countryside. That is no longer the case. Their encroachment into "our territory" has nothing to do with human interaction and everything to do with refuse.
Human habitation is now abundant with waste food. The rise of urban foxes can be traced directly to rise in supermarkets. show me a population of urban foxes and I will walk to the supermarket, because 9 times out of 10 there WILL be one in walking distance. Our supermarkets throw out massive amounts of out of date food into skips. This should be secure but its not. Bin bags are easily torn by teeth and wheelies can be tipped over.
Personally I welcome as much vermin into our towns as possible. I see no need to divide human habitation from nature. We can have our diseases, and our baby-eating rats back, maybe only then will we admit the real cause of all these horribly, nasty, greedy creatures coming into our space - that we produce too much ****.

 

[demographic]

Don't forget that in the wild animals, birds etc live by their wits, there is no or little society and no rules, they quite rightly see us as top preditor.
Foxes have a nasty streak in their nature thats why they are deemed vermin in the countryside.
Once I was talking to a farmer and he explained that two days before a cow had given birth in the night to a calf and that a fox had bitten one ear and half its nose off. The cow met the farmer in the morning very distressed, that night I stayed out and waited sure enough the fox came along and I killed it and left it at the farmers door so that he would see it was dead.
If a fox ever gets in a phesant pen it will kill as many as it can, fortunately I have only seen one example of this we picked up two sack fulls of dead birds and the ones that were still alive were very distressed.

We had a beef and sheepfarm when I was a nipper and there was only one occasion in about 30 years where there was a lamb that might have been killed by a fox (the fox was eating the lamb but we weren't sure if it was already dead before it got to it.

As for the cow being attacked by the fox?

Bovine excrement, I would put a tenner on it not being a fox at all that did it, we had problems with escaped dogs worrying sheep and did the farmer actually see it happen or did he just assume?
Never any foxes attacking cattle.
My tenners on a dog doing it.
Foxes do come out looking for placentas round about lambing time though.

As for poultry being attacked? That's a fair comment. Left their own devices a fox will kill every chicken it can and given enough time it will remove them and bury them somewhere where it can find it later.
People have been keeping poultry for thousands of years, it's about time they worked out how to keep them away from foxes.

We did however have a significant number of times where crows pecked the eyes and sometimes the tongue out of young lambs

 

[pentrekeeper]

OK firecrest you may be right "nasty" was a poor choice of words, I do have a biased opinion because the nature of my work brings me into conflict with those preditors that want to kill my phesants, and it's not confined to foxes.
On one occasion I arrived at a release pen to find eleven dead poults all with one wing pulled through the wire netting, it turned out to be a polecat. It could get through the one inch chicken wire killed a poult and tried to drag it back through but couldn't, so it tried again and again. The next evening I waited up sat next to the pen and somehow sensed its presence as I turned there was a loud clatter as it hit a sheet of corrugated steel in the hedge behind me. It had crept up behind me but it did not come back and try again after that fright.

Demographic you also may be right, the farmer in question did not see the attack it happened in the night, I took his word for what happened, however, I have not seen any "stray" dogs so if it was a dog it must have belonged to someone locally and left out all night which seems a bit unusual, I wouldn't have thought farm dogs would attack animals.

 

[firecrest]

There is only one explination - El Chubacabra

 

[demographic]

I wouldn't have thought farm dogs would attack animals.

You would be surprised, in our experience its usually been badly trained farm dogs that have worried sheep.

Two occasions out of the three I can remember it was border collies from nearby farms that killed sheep (one time seven sheep were killed in one night and the dogs returned to their own farm covered in blood) and the other was a nepolitan mastiff that ripped the face off one.

Theres only been one possible fox attack on a lamb on our farm and even that was more likely to have been a lamb that died then the fox ate some as carrion.

Regards Scott.

 

[brancho]

As for poultry being attacked? That's a fair comment. Left their own devices a fox will kill every chicken it can and given enough time it will remove them and bury them somewhere where it can find it later.

Just like humans dealing with a glut of food but they are usually scared off before they finish.

I wouldn't have thought farm dogs would attack animals.

I wouldnt trust one as far as I could throw it with my teath, they are sneaky horrible things.

 

[demographic]

I wouldnt trust one as far as I could throw it with my teath, they are sneaky horrible things.

I wouldn't go quite as far as that, it's just that its the same instinct that is used to by them hunt animals is the one that we subvert to get them to herd them, it's just the flip side of the same coin.

Well that and we have a Border Collie at home now