An Angry Note

 This was just sent out to all Bristol wildlife groups online. Angry does not cover how I am feeling.

"I am finding it really hard to believe that after all of these months I am having to write this again.

I set up the British Fox Study in 1976, based in Bristol.

This year I attempted to monitor the mange outbreak in Bristol via local Face Book wildlife groups. One or two helpful people but the biggest response was negative and eventually the study was dropped.

In June I was made aware of seemingly healthy foxes dying suddenly. Poison was strongly suspected or, possibly a disease. Official bodies such as the Wildlife Incident Investigation Scheme, DEFRA etc were all disinterested. I spent every day and even until 2-3 am to get evidence and material together and push and pester these bodies until I got Post Mortem Services to accept foxes for investigation. This cost time, money and some of my health.

Bristol City Council refused to cooperate when the investigation started indicating poison was involved. Two fox carcasses were seen by witnesses to have been picked up by the council which then told me it had no record of them (after the street clean team told me they had them). Another fox “went missing” from a council storage site. For this reason BCC was no longer informed about these dead foxes.

We discovered via post mortems that two out of three foxes (therefore notable) had unexplained jaundice –this investigation is ongoing and involves experts in Europe. The most recent fox was found to have been poisoned and this involved international cooperation –an official report was presented to the WIIS for further action.

Every step of the way I have reported on the incidents to alert everyone and explain what is going on and what has been found out.

I am HERE you can contact me via Messenger and if the fox death matches the criteria we have it can be collected for post mortem. Contacting unofficial bodies that cannot carry out post mortems and all the testing is pointless. They mostly have shown no interest in the Bristol cases. The City Council will just collect and incinerate and the evidence is gone.

I can arrange the collections and deal with all the official forms and know that the dead fox will be thoroughly investigated. The police play no part in this as they have been extremely unhelpful to say the least and the term “Wildlife Crime” is used to describe a suspected poisoning and whether deliberate or accidental is up to the pathologist to decide.

After all these months I thought everyone would be on board with this but instead I get attitude.

I may very well just opt out of the entire investigation because if I cannot rely on the support of local wildlife groups then what is the point –let the foxes and badgers carry on getting poisoned."