Cute bundle of fluff… or vicious baby biter?

FOXES UNEARTHED by lucy Jones (elliott and Thompson £14.99)

RICKY GERVAIS dotes on them, while Boris Johnson calls them ‘a pest and a menace’. On greetings cards they appear as adorable bundles of russet fluff, while newspapers characterise them as vicious killers, capable of gnawing a baby’s arm to the bone. Victim or villain, there is no other animal in Britain that polarises opinion as violently as Vulpes vulpes, the red fox.

The conflicting passions so intrigued Londoner Lucy Jones that she decided to investigate. ‘No other creature in Britain has provoked or inspired more column inches, literary characters, parliamentary hours, pub names, cushion covers, Facebook fights, demonstrations and sheer cortisol than the fox,’ she writes.

A good deal of this sound and fury centres around the hunting debate — still mysteriously alive, a dozen years after the 2004 Hunting Act outlawed it. The beleaguered then Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote ruefully in his memoirs, ‘If I’d proposed solving the pension problem by compulsory euthanasia for every fifth pensioner I’d have got less trouble.’

Beautiful and photogenic as foxes are, they remain as controversial as ever.

In part, this is because of the success of urban foxes — street-wise chancers whose invasion of our cities followed the swift spread of suburbs in post-War Britain. In London alone, the fox population is estimated at more than 10,000. In fact, you have a better chance of seeing a fox in Hoxton than you do in the countryside.

Foxes are territorial, and Jones quotes a Bristol study suggesting that each city fox territory provides at least 150 times as much food — scavenged from bins or left by well-wishers — as its inhabitant can consume.

Of course, for every fox-fancier who puts out food, there is a hater who loathes the night shrieks of vixen, and their unlovely habit of slaughtering entire hen-houses — more than they could possibly eat. (Jones explains this isn’t gratuitous, but prudent stocking of the foxy larder).

Describing herself as ‘a reluctant city-dweller’, Jones is at her most entertaining when exploring the rich anecdotage of art and urban myth that has accumulated around foxes over the centuries. She is less compelling when she turns to the hunting debate, to which she devotes two of her six chapters. Her beloved grandfather was a foxhunting man, and she attempts to understand his passion, but finds an outing with hunt saboteurs more congenial.

Among the reams of statistics she reproduces about fox populations, culling methods and comparisons of the numbers of people bitten annually by dogs (thousands) and foxes (very few), and her repeated allegations about the prohunting media spreading scare stories about crazed urban foxes, this can sometimes feel like a book in need of a sharper edit.

But Jones writes with real feeling about the hold of foxes on the human imagination, and her own deep affection for the beguiling creatures.

Jane Shilling is the author of The Fox in The Cupboard, published by Simon & Schuster