It’ll take the cunning of a fox to sort this

THE STORY of the oh-so-luvvie barrister who beat a trapped fox to death with a baseball bat caused very predictable outrage. But the furore hid a genuine urban problem. The city-born, city-raised, city-dwelling fox population is out of control.

The problem was foreseen long ago when a ban on hunting Brer Fox in his native countryside created rural overpopulation. This led to intolerable pressure on their life-support systems and drove thousands of them to seek free food in the garbage dumps of the towns and cities. There they mated and bred, raising a new fox population that has never seen the sun rise over a wheatfield full of wild rabbits, their natural food source.

The standard response is to capture them humanely, put them in a van, run them far from the city centre and “release them into the wild”. Problem solved. Really?

Years ago I spoke to a gamekeeper who was quite accustomed to finding two or more utterly bewildered foxes in a clearing wondering what to do next. The humanitarians from the council had left in their van swathed in a glow of righteousness.

Alas, all they had done was pass on their problem to the countryman, born and bred.

The gamekeeper knew that they were destined to die a slow and agonising death from starvation. Born under a toolshed, raised to free grub in a council tip, these urban foxes could never hunt down the slowest rabbit ever born. Their mums never taught them how.

So he did what humanity required. He used his shotgun to give instantaneous relief from the pain to come.

Despite scores of luvvie staffed TV programmes about the countryside there is still a gulf between town and country.

Mother Nature is not a kindly old lady. She is a ruthless dominatrix who demands to be obeyed. She insists that overpopulation is not a Garden of Eden but a world of starvation and pain. We interfere with her harsh rules at our peril. Overall fox numbers have to be controlled somehow.