For a country dweller, it was a remarkable sight. Cycling near Waterloo one evening this week, around 10.30pm – street lights on, roads quiet – a fox wandered across the road ahead. It had emerged through the railings of a small public park and was sauntering about, head up, confidently perusing the neighbourhood. It slowed as I neared it and the animal looked up at me before nonchalantly going about its business.
This was a strange encounter for a rural dweller, because if I ever catch sight of a fox in West Somerset it is firmly heading in the opposite direction, and at speed. This is in part because I normally have dogs with me, a pair of eager fox-red Labradors. Mainly, though, it’s because foxes are wild; they fear humans for we are predators to them.
Despite this, Mr Fox has made it his business to erase my much-loved poultry. We no longer have fresh eggs for breakfast because he dispatched the Rhode Island Reds and a pair of bantams. The latter I was particularly sad about because they lay cute little eggs and look like they are wearing trousers that need taking up.
Mr Fox didn’t kill them because he was hungry. He just took their heads off. Anyone who, like me, realised one morning that the henhouse had not been shut up properly for the night will be familiar with the distressing trail one embarks upon, discovering first a cluster of feathers, then a headless corpse and then another and so on until you realise the flock is gone and you’ll need to go to Waitrose for your next boiled egg.
And so I support the culling of foxes. They are vermin whose numbers need controlling. It is cruel not to because there simply isn’t enough natural food to go round. I lament the snide and pointless banning of real hunting – it’s a more effective way of killing foxes than shooting them, the death is quicker and I appreciate what an absolute hoot it is to charge across the countryside, jumping fences, sipping sloe gin and saying “goodnight” before you ride home at three o’clock in the afternoon.
Cut to London, and to Mr Fox glibly making his way about town, rifling through bins, leaving streets looking as if a hurricane has hit them. And that’s when he isn’t rummaging through the agriculture files on the fourth-floor Westminster office of a Norfolk MP, as one was found doing just this week. Or – horrifyingly – biting a three-month-old’s head in the comfort of her family home in Watford.
The baby’s mother woke to find herself and the poor child covered in blood after the charming creature had let itself in via an open back door and sunk its teeth into baby Josephine’s head. Luckily, beyond some gruesome puncture wounds, there was no permanent damage to her skull, though as the poor mother pointed out: “I feel violated.” She said: “I don’t feel safe in my home with two young children. Clearly there is an issue of either the same fox or multiple foxes being fed or just really acclimatising and becoming comfortable with people.”
What is done in response to this? Nothing. Which is why there are some 150,000 so-called urban foxes in the UK and 10,000 in London alone.
Westminster City Council’s view, as detailed in their info pack on urban foxes, is that they are a “pest” rather than a “nuisance” and that they should be tolerated because: “No human in the UK from any known record has been killed by a fox.” Meanwhile, London Mayor, Sir Sadiq Khan, is too busy trying to pedestrianise Oxford Street and re-name train lines as apologies to minority ethnic groups, to take a view.
Meanwhile, there comes the full support of most Londoners who take the deluded view that foxes are sweet and furry creatures, a sort of child’s teddy bear come to life, and to seek to be rid of them demonstrates a filthy, immoral form of barbarism.
In reality, Mr Fox is disease-carrying vermin. Folk should not be deluded just because he is cuter than a rat. His number is out of control and he needs culling. The challenge is how. Traffic wardens earning overtime chasing them down the road with nets would be entertaining but ineffective. Indeed, nothing would tickle this country-boy more than the sight of riders and hounds trotting through London doing everyone a favour – including the health of the remaining foxes. Tally ho!