On Fox (and Badger) Extinction -Nothing New

 Regarding the previous post on fox population status The results should also be parallel with the badger cull areas as chief zones for killing, shooting and fox hunting . The main Royal estates and grouse estates will have decline in foxes as killing a fox is seen to protect nesting birds that are destined to be shot for 'fun' later.

I think that the problem is if you have shooters who enjoy killing wildlife (badgers) for money then if they are not seeing enough badgers to kill they will shoot anything else and foxes are a prime target. I write that based on having talked and dealt with shooters from 1977-2017 and though most do the work as "pest control" they are not; shooting rabbits all night may earn them money but shooting the main predator of rabbits, foxes, only allows the rabbit population to increase. Unless that is the intention to keep the work coming in? There is in nature a natural prey-predator ratio and that is a scientific fact that anyone can look up online or (dare I write it?) by reading a book.

No one outside the UK understands the badger cull which is based on very poor science and may even refer to badgers as "scapegoat species". A "scapegoat species" is usually chosen when bad animal husbandry and over killing by humans needs to have blame put elsewhere.

If 100,000 badgers killed on the roads you add that to 250,000 killed 'legally' then that is 350,000 and that is before including illegal shooting, baiting and snaring which might account for another 1000 per year(?). With foxes they reckon a similar number of 100,000 killed on the roads and based on what we've seen in Bristol I reckon that is an under estimate and we know farmers like to shoot any fox they see, we have snarers and of course "fun shooters" claiming to kill at least 200 a month while some claim the total in England is 500 'for fun'.

Dog foxes, vixens, cubs -all 'fun' and that means the breeding population declines but the 'fun shooters' are not worried about that as the odd straying pet dog or cat are equally 'fun' to shoot and I would not be surprised if a figure of 150,000 fox deaths per year was estimated. If people were not treating mange I think we would easily see 200,000 as a good estimate of deaths per year and we need to include parvovirus, babesia, pneumonia, heart and lung worm to fox killers.

We know that the Old types of British fox were hunted to extinction (even though the 'sportsmen' of the time predicted the extinction) by the 1860s. The wild cat was, in 1899, officially recorded as becoming extinct c 1860s. At the same time the red squirrel was also driven to extinction and importing these animals to continue the 'fun' was still going in the 1920s. In the case of the drop of red squirrel numbers the scapegoat species became the grey squirrel. This was to cover up the fact that humans were shooting and poisoning as well as trapping and killing red squirrels "because". Today private estates and commercial forestry are still killing off red squirrels as "vermin" -just as the New wild cats are..

The reason why so many species in the UK have "European DNA" is because their ancestors were imported from Europe to hunt -hares and various species of deer that had been wiped out in various areas.

The "Great Scarcity" of 1923 was likely a near extinction for foxes that took decades to recover and hunting records from the 1940s prove this. In fact, in the 1940s and 1960s the number of foxes killed was "estimated" as hunts attempted to show that there were "so many". Even authors at the time gave a nod and a wink to this lie.

Following the introduction of myxomatosis to the UK 70 years ago the loss of the foxes main prey item also resulted in large numbers of foxes dying off and was, again, at the point of near extinction in England.

It is in their 2004 review of the Red fox in Canids: Foxes, Wolves, Jackals and Dogs, that David Macdonald and Jonathan Reynolds note that, globally:

” ... roughly 75% of foxes die in their first year, and thereafter mortality is approximately 50% in each adult year.”

Sadly, the Bristol Fox Deaths Register confirms this. A fox lasting 1 year is known as a Cub. If it survives to 2 years it is an Adult. After 3 years it is considered Old.   I know that people pay very little attention to these facts and that I am just one voice shouting out but we need to seriously -with the full power of the law- preserve what wild species we have left and in the case of the fox place it on the Red List and politics and "financial donations" (bribes) be damned.

I think in 20 years foxes and badgers will be very rare indeed.