Wild Cats, Old Foxes and the Fear of Experts

 

I started my fox/wild canid work back in 1976 and that involved field work, observation in situ as well as a great deal (a lot!) of archival research .  Before the internet going to public libraries was the only way of finding fox related items; thousands of tightly packed and incredible small print columns.  

The main sources for information were books and those mainly pre-1900 since after that period dogma set in  and dogma repeated ad nauseum becomes 'fact'. 

Even back in the 1870s seasoned naturalists who were also, to their eternal damnation, hunters that helped wipe out species, would tour museums and explain why what those museums were displaying were not wild cats but hybrids -particularly the wild tabby. We are talking about people such as John Colquhoun and Frank Buckland who were seen as the most experienced and knowledgeable experts in the field. They had studied, hunted and killed and had wild cats stuffed and mounted and displayed in their collections. As noted in The Red Paper 2022 (Felids) at a meeting of Scottish naturalists in the 1890s a man who had studied wild cats in Scotland for 40 years presented a paper which backed up the declaration that the true Scottish wild cat had become extinct in the 1860s.

The problem was that sentimentality about "puss" our beloved pets as well as the popularisation of Scotland thanks to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert meant "everything Scottish" was grabbed at.  The tabby style wild cat you see in museums is a hybrid and nothing like the large cat that was once called "The English Tiger"/"The Highland Tiger" and which was hunted with dogs wearing metal studded or thick leather collars as the wild cat could kill them -and severely injure a human hunter. Museums wanted what the British Museum declared to be THE atypical wild cat. The tabby. Up until 1900 true wild cats were not to be found in museum displays as there was no interest.

As a young naturalist I was fooled into believing the wild tabby was the only wild cat type to have existed in the UK. Decades of research taught me a lesson.

The same applies with foxes. As a young naturalist I knew that "The Little Red Dog"; the Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes) was the only fox type to ever exist in the UK. I used to chuckle about the silly stories of extremely large foxes.  All the experts whose books I read ridiculed the idea of a "mountain fox" as none of them had ever seen one so...it did not exist.  All this meant that actually finding book after book, article after article and newspaper reports of Mountain foxes was a slap in the face that woke me up.   

All of the "experts" I had looked up to had not carried out even the most simple research and worse -they were cribbing from one another so that they presented false information as fact. I then managed to find photographs, often very old of wild cats that were not the wild tabby and that led to my discovering illustrations and descriptions of Old fox types -eventually taxidermy proved that those descriptions and illustrations were correct and not exaggerations. What is more there were three types of fox each literally bred for the environment they inhabited. The small Cur fox that lived near human habitation. The Hill or mastiff fox that lived in rough and hilly terrain. Then there was the largest (photo examples in The Red Paper) the Mountain or Greyhound fox -not "reds" and lacking black markings like the red fox has.

It took years to understand the various local names given these foxes and longer before the taxidermies became available. Every reference I found has been included in my work so that it can all be peer reviewed. Even the evidence of a similar fox in Western Europe has been referenced -only one European museum has bothered to cooperate(and find an 1848 British fox in its collection). The, uh, 'expert' of 30 years on red foxes who had the museums collection of taxidermy in a room behind him but refused to even get up and check sums up the situation.

Money and ego.  Publishers have paid authors -"experts"- to write books on foxes and as it was all repeated dogma who gets the biggest red face from embarrassment? The ego is a problem. Yes, they have specialised in red foxes so they know about red foxes. No problem except that they have done no real historical research so the myth of Western Europe, the UK and Ireland having only ever had red foxes is perpetuated and rather than cooperating on the research to present the true history of foxes (or wild cats) the 'experts' hide in their offices unwilling to do anything. That is not how science is supposed to work.

The extinct Hong Kong fox could not be identified by Chinese/Hong Kong museums and it took me years to finally identify the species conclusively (just search blog posts). My colleague, LM, has two foxes that should be of historical importance to French natural history as they may well be the first foxes imported from Canada (and they are NOT red foxes) or they are examples of the extinct Western European fox -we know the name, date and even location of where these ancient foxes were displayed. The Natural History Museum (Paris) had absolutely no interest and even became obstructive in searching their archives.

Scandinavian naturalists doubt that there was an Old type fox in Norway. Yet, we have accounts in newspapers and books of these foxes being imported by hunts to England and descriptions of them -it is possible that, to fulfill hunting binges, the English hunts imported so many of these Norwegian foxes that it led to their extinction there.

All of this fully referenced and details presented and yet some "experts" even refused copies of my book to check it all out.   I had to self publish as despite book company editors praising the manuscripts there was a sudden change in attitude.  UK publishers have a lot of hunt supporters and hunters on their boards.

1976-2024 is a long time researching foxes/wild canids and I have learnt that dogma is always supported.