A Serious Rant

Everyone -everyone-  is aware of the cost of living crisis. People had to resort to food banks, which are under stress. Families are struggling to feed themselves and sacrifices are made to make sure their children are fed.  Some stores are putting food out at low price so you will find chicken drumsticks and wings in bags or trays cheap.

This is what, and you will need to excuse me here, pisses me off. I have seen on Face Book fox groups people posting photos and of discounted chicken and what shops they found it in -"get it while it's cheap!". Every bag or tray is a  meal for humans who really need to look for the discounted foods.

During a hard winter giving a fox a little extra  "in case" is not that objectionable. Feeding a fox or foxes 2-3 times a day is wrong. Having the foxes queue up in your garden like trained pets at a specific time each day is wrong.These are NOT pets. They are wild canids and they are being trained to ignore their natural instincts. There are millions of rats, mice and wild rabbits (rabbits even in suburbs), beetles and other insects that foxes include in their natural diet. I have seen one photo after another on Face Book 'wildlife' groups of the pet garden rat...which will become rats and how are you going to get rid of them? 

Left-overs from your meal is what dogs and cats used to get and its perfectly acceptable for a scavenging fox.

People are being stupid. Plain and simple.

Time and again I see people posting to fox groups how they have fed 'their' foxes once or twice a day for several years but they have to move for employment or just moving home. "Ask the neighbours to feed them!" is the best answer. Yeah, spend your money feeding wild animals that the idiot next door has semi-domesticated then dumped. Far more likely that a fox or foxes congregating outside the neighbours' back door will be reported as nuisances. Local authorities then call in the pest controllers.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

And those foxes encouraged by food into kitchens, living rooms are going to go into other peoples' houses and people who are not keen on foxes. 

BANG! BANG! BANG!

One fox...two or three. Doesn't matter it's all an earner for pest control.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

I have had experience in a rabies zone when I was a kid in Germany and later. The aftermath is not pleasant. You get bitten by a rabid animal the treatment is not pleasant. Previously, foxes were mainly in rural areas and if there was a rabies outbreak less problems for those in towns.

We now have a lot of urban foxes and foxes encouraged to come up to people, be hand fed  and to interact with pet dogs and cats. They come into contact with badgers. Muntjac deer. Hedgehogs. From an isolated and easy to deal with outbreak we are faced with an out of control epidemic. In the 1970s even a false alarm in England resulted in hundreds of mammals and many birds being "culled" -dead animals once removed are no longer a threat to spread the virus.

A rabid fox will bite anything including humans.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

In some countries it is illegal to feed foxes. I some times think that might be a good idea in the UK. Stop the hunts killing foxes but overfeed foxes, cause health problems in foxes so that there are immunity problems -some of these I have seen with the Fox Death Project.

Human food is for humans. Feeders baulk at paying for a one off mange treatment that works but will spend £40-60 a month buying chicken, eggs and worse for wild animals. hey, why pay when there are suckers who'll send you free homeopathic treatment for free? It can be effective in early cases but the best med is the one you can buy. 

I see images and videos of foxes that are overweight -this is not a "healthy" look. Foxes should be slim and can only eat as much as a domestic cat. The number of eggs and rotten chicken gardeners dig up each year shows how overfed foxes are. "It came back three times -poor thing must have been hungry" No. It was taking the food and caching it all. It was left to rot because that fox is fed everyday eats some and buries the rest.

Feeders are domesticating foxes and encouraging large groups when they should be dispersing. Wildlife is wildlife and not garden pets.

I have spent 50 years now studying foxes and I have seen how people have lightly fed in bad weather or when actually treating wounds and injuries. The foxes were always slim and keen to hunt out rodents.  Now we have people feeding 2-3 times daily, dropping homeopathic drops on them when they "think" they have mange (usually when foxes start losing their winter coats). I am seeing fat foxes that ignore their instincts and raise their young to depend on humans for food. It has always been a symbiotic relationship but now some humans are trying to tame foxes and that, one way or another, may lead to very dire circumstances ...for the fox.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE step back. Look at how you are feeding and treating the foxes. They are ignoring their natural food for processed food that is not good.

THINK