For foxes’ sake, stop feeding these nocturnal urban terrorists
As anyone who has ever planned an overelaborate party can attest, you can take a theme too far. This year, with their horticulture in urban Britain theme, the RHS Chelsea Flower Show was asking for trouble. And trouble came, in the form of an urban fox in the night.
Chris Beardshaw’s garden, The Fractal Facts of Nature – the result of months of planning and planting – was wrecked by a fractious fact of nature. The vulpine party pooper had a good dig around, bedding down in the lysimachia and trashing the Snow White lupins beyond repair.
Like many urban gardeners, I feel Beardshaw’s pain. Our fantasies of creating fragrant oases in the city are crushed by the reality of hell-scented fox urine and faeces. Our evening’s peace disrupted by the piercing, deathly howls of foxes as keen on mating and/or fighting as raucously as drunken squaddies on leave.
A recent study suggests that the number of urban foxes has quadrupled in the past 20 years to nearly 150,000 – one for every 300 city dwellers. I see far more foxes in London than I ever do when I return to the rural corner of the north of England where I grew up.
I even have foxes peering down on me while I eat (no one warns you of this amber-eyed indignity when you spend a fortune glassing over the side of your house, which is now compulsory in the more pretentious postcodes of north-east London).
One fox, perhaps irate at not being invited in for lapin à la moutarde, left his own dirty protest right in the middle of the glass, requiring emergency window cleaner dial-up.
Then there was the day I left the back door open, went upstairs for five minutes, and returned to find a fox had helped itself to a bag of icing sugar and shaken it out all over the garden, leaving it looking like the aftermath of a particularly hedonistic night at Studio 54.
My husband’s a step away from forming the Hackney Hunt (tally ho, hipsters).
But we sentimental city dwellers have only ourselves to blame. Foxes are terribly handsome and we don’t have the innate loathing of them that we have of rats.
And they are clever. They go where the food is, whether that is last night’s drunkenly discarded pizza, your unsecured bin, or to Mrs Brown’s at number 84 who, for whatever damply anthropomorphic reason, treats Mr and Mrs Vulpes vulpes (of the Islington Vulpes vulpes) to a delectable buffet of leftover lasagne and slightly stale lemon drizzle cake each evening.
In an interview he gave to Vice, Tom Keightly, a pest controller, gave us filthy townies a firm telling off: “Stop bloody feeding them. They respond to the amount of food that’s available, and that’s it.”
And to those unrepentantly sentimental fox botherers, I say this: an urban fox’s life is a short and miserable one. If cars don’t get them, mange will.
Relocation isn’t the answer – good luck finding any council or landowner who welcomes them – and it almost certainly breaches the Animal Welfare Act of 2006.
The answer is – for foxes’ sake – stop feeding them, whether accidentally or on purpose. And especially on purpose, you witless, lemon-drizzle-headed loons.