They’ve been spotted at Oxford Circus, underneath London’s red double-decker buses, and even in Buckingham Palace. Foxes are taking over the British capital – at least if reports in local media are anything to go by.
The stories tell of a dramatic rise in the number of foxes in the city, and tend to focus on incidents in which the red-haired creatures are the bad guys.
“I spot up to ten foxes every day in the city,” says pest controller Steve Barron as he loads two plastic sacks, each containing a dead fox, onto his pickup truck.
“These two I found in the fox traps that I have set up on the grounds,” Barron says. He’s been hired to monitor a high school campus in north London. The gun he used to kill the animals is still in its holster.
Barron reports that he has killed eight foxes over the previous two weeks on the campus. “This is much more humane than what many private people do in their gardens,” he insists.
He knows some people don’t approve of his work. But there is a lack of awareness of the dangers that foxes can pose to humans, he adds. “I try being discreet. I’m just out here to do my job – safely and humanely. People love foxes, with their bushy tails. So I simply don’t want to rub it in their faces that I kill them.”?
His account is in line with what often is said about foxes. The “nocturnal urban terrorists” – that’s how the Guardian newspaper recently referred to them – can sometimes carry out “brutal attacks.”
Last March, a fox seriously injured a chihuahua in a person’s garden. And last summer, eight Humboldt penguins in at the Chessington World of Adventures theme park in south west London were killed in a fox attack.
Much more rare are cases such as in 2013, when a fox bit off the finger of small child. In an operation, doctors succeeded in reattaching the finger.
London’s mayor at the time – now Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson – commented, “They may appear cuddly and romantic, but foxes are also a pest and a menace, particularly in our cities.”
When his own cat was later attacked by a fox, he said he was so enraged that he wanted to go out and “blaze away” at the fox with his air rifle.
Experts try to look at the situation less emotionally. Dawn Scott, of Brighton University, points out that statistically speaking, there are a great many more attacks on people by dogs than foxes.
“But nobody would so willingly call for the killing of dogs,” says Scott, who for years now has been studying the behaviour and population of foxes in Britain. And you’re much more likely to get a dangerous infection from a household pet than from an urban fox.
Stephen Harris, an environmental scientist at Bristol University, says: “The underlying problem is that anything to do with foxes has been politically charged since the upsurge of the hunting debate in the mid-1990s. Until then press stories about foxes were largely balanced.”
For decades the fox hunt was a deeply embedded British tradition, with foxes chased down by dogs and by hunters on horses. After 700 hours of bitter debate, the British Parliament in 2004 followed the advice of animal protection advocates and banned fox hunts.
Ever since, says Harris, the hunters’ lobby has never tired of trying to stir up fears by issuing predictions about an “overpopulation” of foxes and the supposed danger they pose.
“In comparison, the seven children and five adults killed by dogs since 2005, and the hundreds more disfigured, receive far less coverage,” Harris notes.
In fact, it is difficult to determine the exact fox population in Britain. All the same, many reports carry figures that “are taken out of context,” says Scott.
“Falsified extrapolations contribute considerably to the belief in an explosion-like propagation of the animals,” she adds.
For her studies, Scott collected large-scale samples from around the country, amassing data which she could then compared with the results of a similar study in the 1980s. She came to the conclusion that the fox population had by no means dramatically increased.
“Foxes have increased slightly, but in healthy measure,” she says. In a city like London, the data indicate a population of around 12 foxes per square kilometre, with the density greater in suburban areas than in the centre.
Scott says killing the animals makes little sense. “When one fox is killed, it only expands the territory for another fox,” she explains. In fact, it would require at least 70 per cent of the total fox population to be killed every year for 20 years in order to permanently reduce their numbers.
But it will never come to that – above all because many Britons, despite the negative reports, like foxes. A survey conducted by Brighton University showed that about 80 per cent of urban residents consider wild animals to be an “enrichment” of urban life.
Among other things, fox sightings were found to reduce stress for older people, Scott says. She is certain about one thing: “A city without wildlife would be a strange place.” – DPA




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