An informative extract from “Foxes Unearthed: A Story of Love and Loathing in Modern Britain” by Lucy Jones (and a cracking very balanced read)
" Where foxes get a particularly bad reputation is not over lambs but chickens. Birds make up a part of the fox’s diet and lots of smaller, free-range holdings can be vulnerable to fox predation. It must be traumatic to walk out in the morning to collect your eggs and be met with Parsley and Blossom with their heads ripped off, especially for the growing number of people keeping chickens as part of a sustainable lifestyle, often in urban areas. No wonder that people who’ve had their chickens - or a pet, which happens rarely - taken by a fox may often feel less inclined to support the fox.
The image that doesn’t help the fox’s cause is that, if it gets into a henhouse, it may end up killing a number of chickens and leaving their bloody, ripped-apart corpses in the coop, leading to the assumption that the fox has gone on some kind of psychotic Patrick Bateman-esque murdering spree - that it kills for fun.
There are two reasons for what it’s doing. The first is called surplus killing, a behaviour that is common in above 200 of the species in the order Carnivora. It happens in the wild when a predator is faced with abnormal behaviour in its prey, such as birds nesting in the wrong place. It’s a little like when we’re met with a box of chocolates: even if our bodies don’t need the sugar or calories, we may indulge in more than a couple.
The second is the fox’s tendency to cache any surplus food. It is a great hoarder and will bury all kinds of food, from rodents to birds to frogs and rabbits, to eat at a later date by itself or to feed its family. The fox isn’t fussy about best-before dates or a bit of soil and sometimes the food will sit in a cache for several days.
So when a fox kills more than one chicken in a coop, it usually returns with intent on burying the rest of the food, which it will keep doing until all the birds are taken away. Farmers will set up a gun near the coop to kill the fox, because they know that the fox will be back to collect another bird for its cache.
Although we can never know what a fox feels, ‘fun’, as we perceive it, is an inappropriate assumption. ‘For pleasure, an animal will obviously kill because of positive feedback of having successfully got food and being able to eat’, said Dr Dawn Scott of the University of Brighton. ’ Foxes will kill more than they can eat at that period of time because they cache. Because they are opportunistic, if there is a chance to take more, and kill multiple times, take those animals and go and cache them to store for other periods. In the same way we fill up our larder, they fill up theirs’.
The chicken coop itself is an artificial environment. ‘That scenario would never happen in the wild’, said Dawn. ‘Humans have put it into an artificial scenario where that animal is exposed to multiple stimulus and the predatory responses are going to kick in’. Roger Burrows makes an apt comparison: why don’t we question why a lion kills a zebra, which he cannot possibly eat completely, when a small antelope would do? The fox, the lion, all other predators, kill and eat when they can, It’s up to humans to take measures to control their livestock.
While Richard Bowler has sympathy for people who have lost chickens to a fox, the blame lies, he said, with the human: ‘You’re an intelligent human being; you can build something that’s going to protect your animals. They (the foxes) shouldn’t be in there anyway because we should look after our chickens better than that’.
Harper Asprey Wildlife Rescue said ’ we often have rescue ducklings, and we are well able to protect them from foxes; we never loose them’. ‘So any claim from farmers that it is impossible to make a cage that those fierce foxes cannot break into, and livestock cannot be protected from predation, must be taken with a pinch of salt’.
At Village Farm, with so many foxes around, Rebecca takes special precautions to look after her chickens, with an electric enclosure. Recently, the batteries stopped working and she lost the chickens to a fox. Initially she griped and moaned but her fellow farmer reminded her ‘_You _gave your chickens to the fox’.
She put the clash between foxes and some farmers thus: ‘People like control. There’s a lot of control in people’s lives. Farming is: obliterate everything else bar the stuff you want. Its totalitarian. Look at it and step back: foxes really are our biggest and last predator in this country. We’ve knocked out the lynx, wolves, sea eagles. Foxes and badgers are the last bastion. People like control over things. People hate having foxes poo in their garden and think they’re scum for doing that. They think, I must have control over my empire, my space’.
It is foolish to judge a fox as we would a human. It is a wild animal and attributing intention or traits such as malice, revenge or psychopathy to it is a nonsense."
