It’s time we hounded the foxes from our towns

My neighbour is feeding the foxes. We live in town, and he is feeding the foxes. The foxes who have collectively decamped from the countryside (my husband and I recently came back from a three-week stint in Norfolk, where we saw nary a one, and counted six of the mangy almost-curs over our first weekend back) because there is so much food lying around our cities that they have no more need to be encouraged or supplied with further sustenance than Nicholas Soames. Those foxes.

The rest of the street and surrounding area is going demented, because to anyone sane foxes are vermin. They have no redeeming features. It is they, not squirrels – who at least occasionally nibble attractively on nuts and provide useful fable material for children about the value of deferred gratification – who are rats with better PR. They strew the streets with rubbish, infuse the streets with the tangy smell of vulpine urine, dig up lawns, give our pets unkillable fleas, and drive dogs mad with their very presence. At night they produce a sound so exactly like babies being murdered that I still wake up in a cold sweat and scramble blearily for my phone in order to call the police. Even after full consciousness has been gained, the sound remains so convincing I have to go out and check that infants are not being slaughtered in the street before I can hope to go back to sleep.

I have checked the legislation and we are still not allowed to shoot our neighbours. However, although hunting with hounds has been banned since 2004, we are still allowed to shoot foxes. Unfortunately, this is an urban (human) population and no one has the time to go hunting. So I would like to ask the 27 per cent of Tory voters and 16 per cent of the general public who still remain in favour of fox hunting – as a recent poll discovered in the wake of news that a vote to repeal the 2004 remains a possibility under current Tory thinking – if they wouldn’t mind relocating their hobby.

I think urban fox hunting is an idea whose time has almost come. The sentimentality that The Countryside accused The Town of being swayed by during all the debate and fuss 12 years ago (which itself seems adorably quaint now – imagine being sufficiently free from thoughts of imminent referendum-and-Trump-induced apocalypse to go on marches and care! Really, really care!) has gone. We know foxes now. We startle awake and then lie in bed listening to the slaughtered-infant wails, thinking “if I could find you, Reynard, I would break you apart myself ” and vividly imagining the treats we would lavish on any hound who came back with bloodstained chops and the light of satisfaction at a good day’s work done in his eyes. MPs across south-east London – feel free to vote repeal without demur.

We wouldn’t be able to cope with the full riding to hounds thing, of course. You’d have to learn to do it on Segways instead of on horses and in hi-vis jackets instead of fetching red coats (though you could continue the traditional disregard for chromatic accuracy nicely and still refer to your new livery as pinks). You’d need to nip into Starbucks instead of at a hip flask to keep you going, and the whole thing wouldn’t be quite as picturesque as the set-up you’re used to. But the important thing is that you would still get to kill foxes.