We have no real megafauna left alive on these beautiful islands of ours, and thus we must take whatever small pleasures we can from the remaining wildlife. Foxes provide some of the most amazing nature experiences one can have in this country.
My first encounter with a fox was when I was very young, walking with an uncle towards the River Medway for some fishing we rounded a bend in some long grass we were walking through and there was a vixen. Beautifully orangey coloured, and alert, she was gone in just a second but it thrilled me no end. From then on I savoured every glimpse of these amazing animals I was afforded. Their beauty, stealth and obvious intelligence were things to appreciate, respect and cherish. I'm glad to have grown up in a town surrounded by lakes and the Downs, because I was brought up to understand that you don't get too close to wild animals, for the benefit of them and you (a lesson well learnt when my young uncle thought it'd be funny to put three adders in the bath, I knew not to go anywhere near them even at 3/4 years old).
Sadly it's seems nature is now not something to embrace, but to fear in this modern world. Only on Saturday I wrote about yet more anti-gull nonsense here in my adopted home town of Folkestone. But the nation's media are currently in the middle of a moral panic... over foxes. On Saturday a child was, regrettably, bitten by a fox after he pulled it's tail in Brighton. A few weeks ago two babies were "attacked" in their home and seriously injured by another fox.
These cases are saddening, but not indicative of a greatly increased risk of fox attacks. Foxes are wild animals. Wild animals are unpredictable, defensive and opportunists. They are not evil or menacing. This is why humans need to make sensible decisions to secure their property and learn about the natural world around them (even in urban spaces, just because you build a bunch of houses in one place, it doesn't mean nature will just suddenly give up and go away). Urban foxes are a problem created by ourselves. If you read my comments on the seagull "problem" in the article I linked to above, the solutions proposed there in are just as applicable to any other urban pest. Don't blame the foxes for making good use of the rubbish we provide them.
And the media needs to get some perspective. They will report seagull attacks on just about any scale ("seagull dive bombs postman") and will demonise foxes on just about any matter (the insistence of rural communties that foxes are evil because they "kill more chickens than necessary" seems to ascribe to the fox more intelligence even than us humans who like to kill way more marine life than needed to get our fish. Solution, TAKE BETTER CARE OF YOUR CHICKENS). Here's the thing; people seem to appreciate our wild life but can't quite deal with fact that it is WILD. Red in tooth and claw.
The media seems reluctant to report on dog attacks unless they involve serious injury to a child. In reality domestic dog attack statistics dwarf wild animal attacks in this country. Is that something to be concerned about? Yes. Is the solution a cull of domestic dogs? No. As with wild animals it's all about increased education. That's the real solution, if not the easy one. I just wish the general public, the media and farmers would get a perspective on things. I know, shockingly, farmers (and as I recently found, fisherman) are actually not all-knowing sages when it comes to rural matters. The recent story about the cancelling of a project to introduce sea eagles to East Anglia serves to show this quite clearly. The farmers were against the idea because they might scare their pigs. True story.
It's time the media took responsibility for it's reporting of our natural environment, otherwise we might just destroy it rather than learn to live with it.
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