Just a heads up. We have made a decision to halt (except if an exceptional case crops up) to stop the Fox Deaths Project with Fox no. 50 so are 15 away from that. Sad to think that those 15 will not take long to come up with.
Where cooperation from the public has happened it has been good though there was a little hoaxing and "being awkward", too. Wildlife groups in Bristol have been largely not helpful and one would assume people in wildlife groups would want to know why foxes are dying -and badgers for that matter. Foxes submitted and foxes we lost due to weekends and no storage facilities in the last year total around 80 and those are only the ones we know of. Fox mortality from cub to adult is high.
At one point (well, over a year long period) I was asking wildlife groups whether any members had an old but still working freezer that we could store dead foxes in until Post Mortems --donate freezers not keep dead foxes at home in amongst the frozen foods! Nothing. I made it clear that we were losing foxes because Fri-Monday the PM lab was closed and asked several times whether any of the taxidermists on the groups (of which there were more than a few) could temporarily store a dead fox for us -silence.
I could go on but for myself and my colleague, Zoe Webber, at times it was disheartening. I even tried at one point to ask whether people wanted to donate toward a freezer. Nothing. It was the same as when I originally asked whether people could donate toward post mortems as just a basic one can cost over £250 and if there are tests even more. Nothing. That is why I had to fight for over three months to get official approval for post mortems -and we have learnt a lot from them.
So why stop at 50 foxes? Well, official bodies are tightening their purse strings and no one wants to spend money on "just foxes" but so far we have been lucky. Giving a cut off point of 50 means we have an even number of post mortems to provide useful data nationally, not just locally. It also means to organisation funding PMs knows that we are not going to try to make this an ongoing thing for years (we would and that includes the pathologist). The only way to continue without officially funded PMs would be through public funding and no one cares to do that.
Zoe and I will continbue to monitoir badger deaths (when and if people want to report them) as well as fox deaths as an ongoing thing but that's it.
The next task will be to write up what we have learnt and then distribute that.
It is a shame but the UK is not the animal loving country of myth and running the Bristol Badger Group and Fox Study is a grind at times and with only occasional support such as public reporting there is not much we can do. It was the public apathy back in the early 1990s that killed off the then Bristol Badger watch. Pretty birds, butterflies, fluffy squirrels and others seem to be the things people want to see and hear about and those "horrid large mammals" are of no interest.
I would like to change that.
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