A Request on Old Foxes and Wild Cats In Western Europe

 In an attempt to try to get museums interested in the Extinct Fauna Project I sent emails out to Berlin Natural History Museum (awaiting response) and Paris NHM. Paris replied within a few hours but were far from helpful. My email read:

"Hello.

My name is Terry Hooper-Scharf and I am a naturalist specialising in wild canids and felids since 1976. I run the British Fox Study (1976) and the Wild Cat and Feral Cat Study (1980). I am also a natural history historian and have been looking at foxes and wild cats and how both species in the United Kingdom and Ireland varied from the red fox (Vulpes vulpes) and current European wild cat (F. silvestris) -outlined using historical accounts/records, illustrations and taxidermy specimens.

I wanted to find out whether your Museum holds any images or taxidermy/skins of French foxes or wild cats from the mid 19^th century and earlier and whether it would be possible to get photographs of these?

If your Museum has no such specimens are you aware of any private collections with such specimens that I could contact?

My sincere thanks in advance for your assistance

Warm regards

Terry"

The response was to use the museum data base and then request what I needed. Firstly I had to register and join though their data base AI obviously did not like my not being based at a university!  It got quite weird. Then I was faced with very brief info such as date and where the fox was from and not many from France it seems. Also the entries only had three images -all skulls which does not help and I realised that I would be sending in blind requests with no idea what I was asking for.

I then contacted the responder . and asked simply if there were not someone at the museum who knew whether there were old fox and wild cat taxidermies and explained the difficulty with the data base.  I was sent another link and told I would need to submit a request after I found what I wanted. The data base was simply the same thing. This is seen as a "kiss off" from museums by many and I have to say it felt that way there seemed no interest in cooperating.

So I did what I always do when faced with official obstinacy when it comes to cooperation: I began  to search sources as well as online. I found a number of French and German old paintings/illustrations that showed the overall brown colour we find in Old British foxes though as my colleague LM pointed out the true colour is almost a brindle.

Above:1861 Fox Zoology Old Engraving Natural History - Animals print - antique french paper

Below: 1907 French Photogravure Print of Two Foxes

Above: Vintage Fox Image! This wonderful Animal engraving was scanned from an early Natural History print from France!" My guess is that this was a type of fox that had Old and New DNA in it as there are physical markers you do not see in Old foxes and that coat looks brindled.

Above: Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet a 19th-century French painting. Sadly, images of dead foxes (and other animals) are common from Europe but the overall brown colour shows that in some regions Old types (or hybrids thereof) seem to have continued until later than in the UK and Ireland.

Above and below: German Fox Trap. Pitfall (Field Sports- Edward Orme) , old print 1814 (c)2023 BFS

Below:c. 1657 painting by Frans Snyders: b. 1579. d. 1657. Flemish Baroque painter of animals. Painting of the fable " fox and the heron"

Below: Paudiss, Christopher — Wolf, Fuchs und Schaf (Wolf, Fox and Sheep)— 1666 The fox looks unusual and enlarging it and working on the contrast/light shows the animal more clearly

I find this one interesting and it opens up a lot of questions. The head on the fox looks a little odd but look at the colouration. Is it possible that this is typical of the foxes migrating from the East into Western Europe and bred to create the red fox we know?

 This is the only image I have found of a fox pre 19th century looking unlike the brown types.

The foxes found in paintings from Western Europe pre-19th century are of the all brown -dark or light colouration. The "black socks" are actually dark brown. One thing that my colleague LM noted is that the black "tear stain" running from the eye over the muzzle is not seen in Old foxes.

There are similar paintings of foxes -brown with no real hint of black on them from other countries including Spain. These form a data base for future research but goes to show that the "little red dog" (Vulpes vulpes) was not common in Western Europe and even today we are seeing red foxes migrating into Scandinavia as they follow human habitation. With so many historical human migrations across Europe it seems the fox that we know today (or its ancestors) followed and as Old foxes were wiped out so they took their place.

This is research that requires cross Europe cooperation between naturalists and zoologists and the work has only just begun.