Foxes, Fairytales, and the Price of Wild Myths

Town & Country

We’ve just returned from a long overdue and enjoyable weekend in London, spending time with dear friends, eager to see their new apartment in a purpose built block near Trent Park in the north of the city. A light, airy space with a small patio and a large communal garden to the rear, boasting lawn, flower margins and mature, specimen trees; cyprus, copper beech, weeping willow and oak. 

As he proudly showed me where they hope, with their new neighbours, to build an outdoor kitchen and covered seating area, I found myself distracted, eyes searching for where they kept their bins and how their private area was fenced. The cause of my mental wanderings was the powerful scent of fox that pervaded the garden, the intensity in certain areas giving indications of patrol routes and frequency of visits by probably several urban ginger bandits. Seemingly oblivious to the musky odour, he led me past the new bicycle stand for the building (a local authority planning essential these days, apparently, roofed and bristling with CCTV cameras) back to their patio where, with the parakeets screeching overhead, we opened cold beers and caught up on the months since our last meeting.

Back home now in Cornwall, I’m wading through the week’s to-do list. I need to collect a call magpie from a local farmer on Thursday to man my Larsen trap in an effort to remove some of the more than a dozen magpies that vigorously patrol the hedgerows in our hamlet, targeting the songbird nests and terrorising the neighbour’s caged finches. 

First silage cuts are happening on the local farms and also at our modest DIY shoot, so I am looking closely at weather reports and moon phases to plan some fox control visits, meanwhile keeping an eye on the trail cams, mindful of our small scale tree planting efforts, to see if the grey squirrel population in the woods is peaking again. I also promised the farmer I would get up to the cattle sheds and cull the feral pigeons that are making a filthy mess on the machinery and getting into the feed stores. I need to find time to clear rabbits that are creating havoc at the local campsite too.

The idiocy of social media

Beside me on the kitchen table, my phone pings, advising me of a new notification on Facebook and I idly glance at it. A countryside group I follow has, somewhat sarcastically, reposted a video from The Fox Project (registered charity number 1190070,who’s mission statement is ‘dedicated to rescue, rehab and release of the red fox in SE England’ and boasting a certain celebrity resident of the New Forest as Patron). The video shows a fox and a roe doe near a patch of long grass beneath a small tree. The fox is nipping in and retreating, turning and darting, the doe parrying and dropping her head to rush the fox, boldly standing up to his advances . To my eye, the doe is clearly defending a hidden fawn whilst the fox is trying to get past her defences, attempting to chase her away in order to get access to the hidden fawn. But to the some 427,000 followers of the group, the two animals are engaging in frolicking play, gambolling in the dappled sunshine with gay abandon in some utopian, Disneyfied paradise. Shared 2,700 times and with 360 comments and over 20,000 likes, I feel my own efforts to portray life in the countryside on YouTube pale into insignificance.

Penny says “Like they have been friends for a long time. Long may it last, that’s how it should be. Peace and living in harmony. Beautiful to wake up to this morning XX”. 

Natasha replied “I see foxes and deer play chase and catch all the time. It’s adorable”. 

Some commenters are bold enough to suggest that, just maybe, the distressed doe is trying to protect a hidden fawn but these voices are dismissed and squashed by the outpouring of misguided awe at the camaraderie and dewy eyed loveliness of mother nature.

Money talks

The Fox Project received donations of some £448,000 in the year to April 2024 and lists expenditure at £560,000 for the same period (charitycommission.gov). Established in 1991, they provide a wildlife hospital and fox ambulance service and claim to treat over 1400 foxes a year. They also offer ‘deterrent consultancy’ to businesses and homeowners which their website tells me is ‘designed to provide a humane alternative to old-fashioned ‘pest control’, whereby animals are killed annually - usually at high cost to householders and businesses - only to be naturally and very predictably replaced within weeks by other members of a self-regulating species that has never been controlled by man”. 

I have no idea what a ‘self-regulating species’ is, nor can I bring to mind, beyond the common cold, a species that has never been controlled by man. It seems like a wonderful and convenient conceit. I wonder whose land these 1400 treated foxes end up on every year and whether this organisation, and others like, it are the source of the reports of emaciated and bewildered foxes appearing in the countryside, neutered and freshly stitched but lacking the skills to survive without a bin on every corner. I also wonder how many foxes I could ‘help’ for £450,000 a year!

In the UK as a whole in 2024, £15.4 BILLION was donated to UK charities, of which nearly £2 BILLION was donated to animal and environmental charities, according to the UK Giving report from the Charities Aid Foundation, CAF.

That’s 13% of all UK charity donations directed to animal charities. 

Some sources put that figure even higher at £6.5billion but it’s hard to corroborate such interpretations. Either way, however the actual figure is calculated, to my simple mind, any pound amount in the billions is a colossal amount of cash!

(by way of context, latest figures put the whole of UK agriculture at 0.58% of GDP, generating some £15 billion to the UK economy whilst employing some 460,000 people).

With these vast sums of money in play, there is surely the temptation to blur the lines between what nature actually is and what people want to tell themselves it is, for fear it may risk slowing down the gravy train or even derailing it for the more ‘imaginative’ flights of fancy.

It strikes me, that, with so much cash at stake, the same callous attitudes the grifters of the colossal global ‘wellness’ industry have honed and perfected, weaving as they do between fact and fiction to create a confusing yet unsettling pastiche of the truth, have been adopted by some of the animal and wildlife charities and organisations’ less scrupulous players to open the pockets of the gullible or easily influenced by telling them what they want to hear.

People and animals

As social hairless apes, we have always told each other stories of animals and our place amongst them. From the paintings on the walls of the caves at Lascaux, el Castillo and more, through Aesop’s fables and the Grimms’ fairy tales, animals have always been cast as friend or foe, prey or predator. The cunning fox, the stubborn mule, the noble eagle, such characteristics are still familiar to us today but somewhere along the way, that relationship has, for many, become so distant and disjointed that it has taken on a fanciful romantic mantle.

Take dogs, for example. Widely estimated to have begun to be domesticated perhaps as far back as 14,000 years ago, for the majority of that time they were generally kept for their working capabilities, be that herding, hunting or protection. Whilst, no doubt, companionship was often a happy byproduct of that relationship, the concept of a dog as a pet is a fairly recent concoction and today, referring to the family dog as a ‘fur baby’ is almost ubiquitous. 

In a survey in the US in 2011 by Kelton Research (Psychology Today) 81% of respondents considered their dog to be an integral part of their family and more than half were happy using nicknames for themselves, in relation to their dogs, such as ‘mummy’ and ‘daddy’. 

Though I confess, both my wife and I keenly showed multiple pictures of our spaniels to our patiently indulgent urban friends at the weekend! We don’t have children…

However, this anthropomorphising of our pets seems now to extend to wild animals as well. From The Wind in the Willows, Beatrix Potter and even Animal Farm, to Walt Disney, Hollywood feel-good movies and the plethora of children’s books and cartoons, animals are being increasingly used as a canvas to project our interpretation of our most noble and compassionate urges whilst beautiful natural history series and earnest documentaries have repeatedly framed humanity as the problem with the world. Is it any wonder then that the millions of people in this country, who do not physically interact with the natural world in any practical way, are content, even directed, to view nature as a beautifully balanced, self regulating paradise?

This romanticised thinking, fanned and encouraged by the recipients of such financial generosity, is leading us into some rather dangerous territory for the countryside. When this seemingly all-pervasive ‘four legs good, two legs bad” thinking holds such powerful sway as to direct National politics and to demand the removal of any practical measures to actually exert some control and balance over our natural environment, at what point will this folly reveal itself? 

For too many people without the first idea what, say, a curlew even is, its potential demise is a fleeting blip. To them, nature is what goes on around them and their financial donations and subscriptions are what keeps it happily ticking along. I’m quite sure that such myopia would clear instantly for individuals if a fox gets into the bins or wasps invade the attic or rats get into the walls, their demands for control and extermination would surely follow, but to the many, this one-eyed approach is comforting and self-confirming, a sanctimonious viewpoint that all wild things are sacrosanct, no animal can be harmed, no tree felled and no ‘wild’ space interfered with.

Nature knows best?

We are continually told how nature, left to its own devices, produces a perfect balance. It is preached and proselytized by politicians and campaigners, celebrities and charities. I like to think that many are well intentioned but when billions of pounds and media approval are on offer, how much real thought, and possibly honesty, has gone into their strident positions.

If they are wrong and our natural environment has dwindled to crows and foxes raiding uncollected rubbish whilst countless beavers dam our knotweed choked waterways, how many of the current loudest voices will still be around to accept the consequences?

For my part, I will continue to resist mashing my keyboard when I see posts on social media extolling the virtues of people rehabilitating and releasing grey squirrels and continue to smirk into my morning cuppa as the local news website breathlessly reports on sightings of an impossibly rare albino pheasant, or the local facebook village group again tries to explain to a new “local” that the lonely and sad looking sheep they’d just spotted out on the cliff is probably fine and that the farmer will absolutely be along to check it’s OK.

 But I will continue to feed the call bird in my Larsen trap, hoping to protect the broods of barn swallows and whitethroat and step up my efforts to cut down the fox numbers to allow some of the wild ducks and skylarks to fledge some young to continue their lines. I will, whenever I can, try to cajole and encourage people I meet to try to understand that what I do comes from a place of deep love for nature and a real drive to improve and promote the well being of my little corner of the countryside.

I’m not going to tell my friend about his fox issue. He has little interest in country matters, he’s a townie. But he loves eating game and understands, enjoys and seeks out high welfare British beef. He’ll never be a true convert, but I feel he’s at least half way there.

On a recent work day on our little DIY shoot, we were taking a break from clearing some hazel to create some open space for butterflies, feeling rather pleased with our endeavours to help the wildlife. An old keeper friend looked up from rolling his cigarette and grunted “Huh, wildlife - that’s just a townie word for vermin”...