A Fox In A Tree

 There was a photograph in the Metro newspaper some years ago. It was a photo taken from a distance but showed a fox in the top of a tree resting. Mind-boggling, apparently. It showed how little people knew about foxes. When the local TV station was HTV the news ocxcasionally carried images of a fox sleeping in the sun on a rooftop. BBC used to show similar.

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A familiar night time sound used to be the padding of a quadruped on the roof. Mainly cats these days but at one time the noise makers used to be foxes. These animals are not known as "the cat-like canid" for nothing -excellent night vision, fast and agile as a cat and great climbers. It is one reason that the most common ailment reported in foxes (other than mange) are limps or leg injuries.  A wrongly judged leap or jump down and there you go. The legs tend to get better after a week or so.

The old 'sport' (hunting) books often referred to having to check trees once the scent of a fox was lost. Oddly, even back in the Middle Ages people knew foxes climbed into trees. It is the complete lack of real wildlife education, especially when it comes to foxes (and badgers) that quite literally wiped common knowledge from peoples' minds.

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It is well over two decades ago now that I was trawling old newspaper archives and came across one interesting story (it's included in The Red Paper: Canids) that had me stumped. It referred to a gamekeeper who out one day found a fox trapped between two tree branches. The man got the fox loose and "took it back to house it in the stables". The number of questions that ran through my head made me giddy.

He was a gamekeeper and he never shot the fox??

He 'rescued' the fox??

He took the fox back with him and housed it in the stables?

None of this made sense. Then I learnt more about "bagging a fox" which along with everyone else I was taught meant kill a fox. When I read in another news item how a "bagged fox" from the stables of another hunt master was set loose for 'sport' that day I got an inkling something made sense. 

I purchased more old (19th century  hunt books and with the very first one the once very well known (but denied and lied about in modern times) practice of catching a fox before the hounds got to it and putting it in a bag/sack ("bagging") so that it could be released for 'sport' on another day was revealed. Some foxes could be bagged and go through the trauma of being hunted 5-6 times. The very definition of animal cruelty. 

Foxes were imported into the UK for the 'sport' though ones from certain countries were not popular as they were lazy and never gave any really 'good sport' and it has to be remembered that the important thing about the 'sport' was the duration of the chase -hounds and horses pushed to their limits and dying after collapsing apparently meant little (apart from the annoyance of having to pay out for another horse -one hunter refused to let his horse die from over exhaustion and he was mocked).

Later one the mystery of so many wolves and jackals in the UK was also solved and even coyotes. I also discovered that hunt members practiced their own animal version of eugenics; they did this with hunters (horses) as well as their hounds with breeding and selecting the ones with the "right qualities" that they wanted. Each hunt master had a "type" of hound bred for him. Fox and dog breeding seemed to be common (and failed every time), there were attempts to breed jackal-fox hybrids, wolf-jackals and jackal-dog hybrids just so get a better animal to hunt. 

All of this came from stumbling across one 19th century newspaper clipping but one has to remember that fox hunting was reported on as a sport, along with its super stars just as football is today with hounds being bought or transferred between hunts and imported fox transportation to estates all being worth a column.

We have all the contemporary accounts (including the fact that housing and diet for captive foxes was perfected by the 1800s with each huntsman having their own recipe as well as design for artificial culverts (dens) and how they should be constructed) of the hunts and importations as well as when Old foxes, like wild cats, became extinct. Physical evidence? Well, in The Red Paper the evidence is presented in the form of surviving taxidermy -not relying solely on my knowledge but asking for identification confirmation from  specialists in coyotes and wolves. We have the taxidermy as well as photographs of the ones that we could not get to in time to buy -all sold as 'foxes'.

All of this because of one fox trapped in tree branches story that led to so much more. The final fate of that fox was probably  not good but every time I see a photo of a fox in a tree I think about it.