CONFLICTED ABOUT BRITS AND FOXES

I've noticed a lot of foxes running around in London - not in the tourist centre of course but throughout the suburbs - mainly along rail lines where, in the warren of scruffy vegetation bordering the lines i guess they live.
At the B&B i stay at in Eltham, the garden backs up to the Overground rail line and many nights coming back to the B&B i've seen foxes lurking about. And years ago, camping at Sidcup's ("Mudcup as we called it!) municipal scout camp ground in a vast park we saw foxes often - including a rare, i guess, albino fox.)

This was a few years back during the debate about Fox Hunting and i had just read in the Herald-Tribune that foxes were 'considered vermin' in the U.K.

So i was talking at breakfast with the nice B&B lady about the foxes that i had seen, expecting here to react like they were vermin.

But lo and behold she said that the fox behind her garden was her pet fox! She regularly went to the butchers and bought chicken livers for it. I asked her if she thought her cat was endangered by the fox and she said no - in fact often in daytime she said the cat would be laying on the small tool shed and the fox would be laying on the ground below, all in tranquility.
I guess the fox had his/her full of constant chicken livers and didn't need to snack on cat (Alf!) - but she said others also fed foxes in the area and many considered them to be practically pets.

She then said "it's not foxes you have to be worried about - it's people!" I agreed with her on this and went about my breakfast.

When i called to book the B&B the next year i heard the lady had died and i wondered who if anyone was feeding her pet fox or was he snacking on cats and dogs.

Q - Do Brits consider foxes as vermin or pets?

ALL Brits?

Do all Americans consider ferrets vermin or pets?

It all depends what threat the foxes are to you. Where I live they are a bit of a pest as they get in the bins and leave rubbish anywhere, but then I don't actually run a sheep farm in my London garden - so they don't really bother me.

However in the country they are a genuine pest as they attack lambs and chickens (free range chickens are all over the place these days) so they are a pest there.

To be honest the hunting debate had sod-all to do with controlling the numbers of foxes. Hunting them on horseback with dogs is a rubbish way of killing foxes. It was the mean minded two-bob members of the labour government's (think a particularly up-themselves sixth form do gooder, then double it and you're still nowhere near how wanky these people are) petty revenge for the miner's strike. Like a lot of things in Britain - it all boils down to class (or more accurately class perception as foxhunting isn't only the preserve of the toffs)

The B&B lady may also have gotten lucky in the genetic soup swimming in that fox. A study was recently published (based on years of selective breeding) demonstrating that some strains of foxes can be every bit as dometicated as dogs while others remain highly aggressive and determinedly wild. Perhaps the semi-pet foxes happen to carry some of the more submissive genes; coupled with a close and congenial proximity to humans, they've chilled out (and, not being stupid animals, know they've got a sweet deal).
An article on the study appeared in the NYT and IHT; I sent my hard copy to my mother, but you should still be able to find it online.
I have seen foxes in our neighborhood in the wee hours of the morning, but they're quite shy (nobody feeds them). However, the cats that roam around at the same time don't seem in the least concerned.

An excerpt from the piece:

"...a remarkable experiment started in the former Soviet Union in 1959 by Dmitri K. Belyaev. Belyaev and his brother were geneticists who believed in Mendelian theory despite the domination of Soviet science by Trofim Lysenko, who rejected Mendelian genetics.

Belyaev’s brother was exiled to a concentration camp, where he died, but Belyaev was able to move to Siberia in 1958 and became director of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk. There he was able to study genetics in relative freedom, according to a report prepared by Dr. Fitch after a visit to the institute in 2002.

Belyaev decided to study the genetics of domestication, a problem to which Darwin gave deep attention. Domesticated animals differ in many ways from their wild counterparts, and it has never been clear just which qualities were selected for by the Neolithic farmers who developed most major farm species some 10,000 years ago.

Belyaev’s hypothesis was that all domesticated species had been selected for a single criterion: tameness. This quality, in his view, had dragged along with it most of the other features that distinguish domestic animals from their wild forebears, like droopy ears, patches of white in the fur and changes in skull shape.

Belyaev chose to test his theory on the silver fox, a variant of the common red fox, because it is a social animal and is related to the dog. Though fur farmers had kept silver foxes for about 50 years, the foxes remained quite wild. Belyaev began his experiment in 1959 with 130 farm-bred silver foxes, using their tolerance of human contact as the sole criterion for choosing the parents of the next generation.

“The audacity of this experiment is difficult to overestimate,” Dr. Fitch has written. “The selection process on dogs, horses, cattle or other species had occurred, mostly unconsciously, over thousands of years, and the idea that Belyaev’s experiment might succeed in a human lifetime must have seemed bold indeed.”

In fact, after only eight generations, foxes that would tolerate human presence became common in Belyaev’s stock. Belyaev died in 1985, but his experiment was continued by his successor, Lyudmila N. Trut. The experiment did not become widely known outside Russia until 1999, when Dr. Trut published an article in American Scientist. She reported that after 40 years of the experiment, and the breeding of 45,000 foxes, a group of animals had emerged that were as tame and as eager to please as a dog.

As Belyaev had predicted, other changes appeared along with the tameness, even though they had not been selected for. The tame silver foxes had begun to show white patches on their fur, floppy ears, rolled tails and smaller skulls.

The tame foxes, Dr. Fitch reported, were also “incredibly endearing.” They were clean and quiet and made excellent house pets, though — being highly active — they preferred a house with a yard to an apartment. They did not like leashes, though they tolerated them. "

Although carniverous, foxes are quite small and not very brave. They certainly don't ever tackle anything that might fight back, and will run away from cats and dogs that give them a 'funny look' for example. In rural areas they will take lambs and poultry but most of their diet will be rabbits, rats, voles, mice, beetles, other insects. In urban areas they will mainly hoover up fast food litter and rubbish. People in towns tend to see them either as
a)cute and something to encourage
b)a nuisance as they knock my dustbin over to find their dinner.
They are considered vermin in the country more than in town. In neither place are they considered vermin in the sense of disease-spreading things, like rats. Even in the country, where they are more likely to be considered vermin as they kill small livestock, you don't get the 'yuk! vermin!' factor.

Foxes get very used to people and not shy at all. Everywhere I've lived has had a fox or two 'regular' wandering round in the evening and they just ignore you. The other evening I went to a country park and we were just finishing off at the kids playground at about 6pm, and a fox turned up and trotted round the playground eating all the stuff the kids had dropped, then carefully jumped right into each rubbish bin to investigate. It probably comes in around that time every night - not too many people still around, but the playground hasn't been cleared up at all.

We have a little family of foxes which has lived just beyond our back fence for at least three years in an area which is basically forest and dense undergrowth surrounded by a very dense human population.

I am certain these animals survive by hunting squirrels, etc. When they are out and about they totally ignore our two dogs who go ballistic when they see them but, of course, cannot reach them.

We enjoy their distant presence and am happy they have endured as long as they have.

Audere,

Fox are hunted with hounds, not dogs.

Surely in English, if not in Hunter, hounds are dogs, and the plural of "fox" is "foxes."

"Fox-hunting: the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible."
--Oscar Wilde
The fox, or foxes, once did eat my pet dicks, Haidee and Phillip, on a farm in Wales. Nothing left but feet and bills.
Yrs, Robert

Not even the most neanderthal sab-shooter in my local Hunt expects the rest of us to share his bizarre jargon.

True, there are Princess Anne lookalikes who insist on calling their dogs 'hounds', just as they insist on calling white horses 'grey', when braying to each other.

But they've discovered that, when talking to the rest of us, English is the only language that works.

And in English, foxhounds, just like chihuahuas, are dogs. And they hunt foxes.

I'm hoping miasmadude meant ducks.

As an agnostic on the fox-hunting thing (it struck me both sides were putting forward some pretty weak arguments for the sake of dramatising some rather more personally emotional motive, but that's politics, I suppose), I did wonder how long it would be before townspeople would turn. I thought it might be if some unfortunate child cornered a fox and teased it to the point of getting bitten, but I should have realised it would be (as on a recent local TV news story) the "threat" to property values caused by some particularly intrusive and noisy foxes fighting in gardens.

The ones near me might be helping keep rat numbers down, and/or clearing up food litter from people who (understandably) throw away half-eaten late night kebabs; but unfortunately, the foxes also go into the litter bins and scatter the contents around trying to get to the food scraps.

Worse things than foxes in the average Canadian backyard.

I'm quite fond of them. I see one most mornings when I run in Hyde Park. It's all nature to me.

I think most townies regard foxes with an equal mixture of:
(a) 'ooh look, there's a fox, isn't it cute', and
(b) 'bloody foxes were making a real racket last night/have been in my bins again'.

Farmers regard them as a real pest for nicking their chickens.

The thing that really annoys me about them is the racket they make when they're shagging - Blimey!

They seem to like to do this under my bedroom window.

In any case, in sunny Wimbledon we have the wombles to deal with them too - it's a fight of the scavengers - and those wombles are viscious little sods.

I know Kate, I did also say they are considered vermin in the country because they kill livestock.

Pardon me but no one in my Hunt knows what the word womble means - what kind of vermin is this and is it hunted? Or are they pets to some folk?

<<Pardon me but no one in my Hunt knows what the word womble means - what kind of vermin is this and is it hunted? Or are they pets to some folk?>>

We could have some fun here

Regards
Orinoco

Author: nona1
Date: 09/13/2006, 09:26 am
I know Kate, I did also say they are considered vermin in the country because they kill livestock.>>>>>>

Foxes or wombles?

Wombles generally don't hunt - they scavenge on things that people leave behind. Mind you - if you annoy them they can turn nasty. One chased me home from the pub one night.

Pal Q's question is a wonderful example of the mental sloppiness that's inevitable is you take practically anything the Herald Tribune writes as worth anything - now the paper can't be used to wrap chips.

In parts of the New World, "considered vermin" had a real meaning: both in bits of the US and Australia an animal "considered vermin" could be killed at will. The term has never had that meaning in Britain, or at least that's what the OED says

What the IHT was doing - as some US websites also do - was erroneously using a once almost-technical American term to describe an English reality.

Foxes aren't considered vermin by anyone in Britain in the sense racoons or rabbits have sometimes been so considered in the US, because the word's never had that meaning.

Many rural Britons do consider foxes as animals that should be destroyed on sight: practically all rural Britons, except for a lunatic fringe, believe foxes may be destroyed immediately if they're a threat, though most would prefer they were killed less repellently than the hunting fraternity.

Most urbanites have a more benign attitude.

In any of these cases, using the word "vermin" doesn't add anything: to Britons it's just an emotive term, conveying only dislike.

I suspect the IHT writer didn't have the faintest idea what he meant when he used the term.

A sub-editor on a professional newspaper - like the Sun - wouldn't have allowed such cotton-wool writing within a mile of the place.