You will never look at the British fox in the same way again.

 

I have found that you can make a lot of discoveries about foxes and when I published The Red Paper in 2011 I thought that I had no more to learn.

Yes, I can be that stupid.

Once you get hooked by a specific animal -in this case the fox- your eyes and ears pick up on a lot of things that might ordinarily go unnoticed. By 2015 I had learnt a lot more and as there were no publishers interested in what was described as an "explosive book on British wildlife" back in 2010/2011 well, the number didn't increase after that.

In the years from 2011 onward I barely go a year without making one or two discoveries and now possessing a library of digital and hard copy books from the "Golden Age of Fox Hunting" (1800-1900) I have amassed far more information and increasing amounts of evidence that seep not just into UK foxes (ie. Old Fox types) but also into exotics of the canid and felid types. And by evidence I mean physical evidence checked by experts in their field.

I was somewhat taken aback by a German naturalist who said: "What do you mean you have produced this work with no official funding?  Producing the Red Paper in Europe would have soaked up many thousands of Euros in grants."  I had to point out that the UK tends not to support wildlife research unless their is something in it -great publicity in returning the beaver, etc..  I did once and only once try to work out what I had paid "out of pocket" on just the Fox Study (ignoring the Felid Study and EAR) since 1976. I never completed the actual estimate because just getting up to the 1990s  it amounted to thousands.

With financial assistance, of course, the work would move much faster. But this is the UK and publishers or funding are now non existent when it comes to that (compared to even the 1980s when wildlife books were published in huge numbers)

The discoveries willbe revealed but things move slowly. One thing guaranteed; you will never look at the British fox in the same way again.