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Foxageddon
When two babies were bitten in their house by a fox the other day, I wondered why the media were going so absolutely baws oot crazy about it, and made a quiet wee joke to myself that foxes were going to be the Daily Mail’s new target. Lo and behold, the campaign begins! It’s taken me about three attempts to actually start writing this post, because I’m a pretty sensible person and I can’t stop pissing myself at the Daily Fail article in question; it’s genuinely one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time, and I can’t help wishing that I’d written it as a satire piece for Letfield.
For those that can’t be bothered clicking the link, the article is a kind of hideous mash up of Countryside Alliance rhetoric and the Daily Mail’s own special brand of moral crusading; it would seem that, for them, foxes are the new terrorists. According to the ‘journalist’ who wrote this, Rory Knight Bruce, there’s a concerted PR campaign to give foxes a false cuddly image, which unites animal rights activists and Roald Dahl in a fiendish conspiracy to make children think foxes are their friends. Presumably the foxes made a generous contribution to Dahl’s estate so that it would be easy for them to find vulnerable children whose faces they can rip off.
A few years back, I was walking home and I saw a red fox just outside my house. I stopped downwind of it and crouched down to watch it a wee while, because I’ve always been an obsessive fan of animals. There was another girl coming from the opposite direction, and she had a pretty different reaction. She saw the fox, froze, and then ran screaming away from it. I laughed at the time, but apparently the mail considers that a measured reaction to these clearly evil and vicious little bastards.
They interview a completely unbiased trapper who makes his living shooting foxes, and surprisingly enough he says anyone who views them as essentially benign is “living in cloud cuckoo land” and then goes on to list a number of domestic animals that have supposedly been lost to fox attacks. Did anyone really need this wanker to give them the news that foxes like to eat small furry animals that have probably been left outside? He also totally overstates the incidence of foxes attacking dogs and cats. Foxes tend to be not much bigger than your average cat, and much smaller than the dogs most people have. Also, a lot of small dogs such as terriers have been bred for killing ‘vermin’ and would easily beat a fox in a fight. It would seem though that it’s the eating of a koi carp that cost £1500 that really offends Trapper Wank. Those damn foxes have no respect for private property! What are they, animals?! No doubt they raised the money to bribe Roald Dahl and the pro-fox sophists by selling the expensive koi meat down Brick Lane.
The mail then goes on to give us the shocking news that foxes mark their territory by pissing and shitting! You know, unlike nearly every other animal to walk the planet. What dirty wee bastards! See if you’re THAT bothered about foxes coming in your garden for a shit and your chickens are actually being taken by them, then there are a couple of things you can do. You need to get a handy male friend and ask him to piss all over your garden instead. Oh, and dig your fucking coop fence in, you stupid noob.
A fox lets out a groan of satisfaction after taking a huge dump on the Daily Mail editor's head.
Of course, it’s not just that fox shit is clearly disgusting, oh no, we have to remember that these dangerous animals can give us diseases as well! The Daily Mail informs us that fox shit can carry Toxascaris, a variety of parasitic roundworm. We’re also given the scary statistic that there are around one hundred new cases of Toxascaris a year in humans! If you know anything about statistics, medicine or not being a chump, then you should be pissing yourself right now, because one hundred cases a year is nothing. It’s the same as the number of cases of the very rare Q Fever, an infection that usually turns up in people who work closely with animals. Of course, the mail doesn’t tell you that, and they also don’t tell you that domestic dogs and cats also carry Toxascaris.
Hillariously, the mail also mentions a few foxes who, in the course of their natural chewing behaviour, developed a taste for brake fluid and started biting through the cables on cars, and it’s almost like the writer thinks there was some kind of malicious intent behind it. However, this shouldn’t really surprise us given that he spends a couple of paragraphs whining about how nasty foxes have been to him and his family. One vixen, who he tried to rescue from a collapsed earth, had the temerity to bite him! Why, who could imagine a frightened and cornered wild animal biting a person who touched them? Any animal worker will tell you that being bitten is part of the job when you get close to wildlife.
He also tells us that he believes two of his family terriers were killed by foxes. One through mange (because dogs never, ever get mange without the help of a fox) and one due to a “characteristically vicious assault”, which suggests to me that he didn’t actually see the fox killing his dog. Quite apart from that, if his dog was killed by a fox, it’s very likely that the terrier (as I’ve already said, they have hunting and killing in their genes) started the fight.
And then there’s the big issue. Rory cites two instances of foxes attacking children to boost his campaign against their brushy reign of terror. What he doesn’t tell you is that these two cases are pretty much the only two in a fucking age. The BBC felt the need to do a measured evaluation of how often foxes attack people, and I can save you the bother of going to look it up. The answer is (drumroll) almost never, you foaming at the mouth mail reading chumps.
From all this easily debunked nonsense, Rory reaches “the inescapable conclusion that the urban fox is a pest that needs to be controlled.” Well I’ll tell you what, following his logic (disease, bite rates etc.) then clearly we need to shoot all the domestic dogs and cats in the UK, and probably all the small furry pets too, because they bite people a hell of a lot more than foxes do. SSY demands that we start to eliminate this dangerous menace NOW, and we further posit that any objections to this plan are just lily livered liberal nonsense that does not recognise the fact that humans are clearly superior to other animals, and have a right to destroy any part of the natural world that inconveniences them in any way.
The face of evil.
I think it’s worthwhile repeating this excellent comment from SSY’s own ‘Rupert Sutherland Fraser’, which was left on the Daily Mail site.
“At last some common sense on this issue. The animal rights lobby have gone too far. Its not just foxes that are a menace I’m sick of moles ruining my croquet lawn and our so called ‘feathered friends’ defecating in my swimming pool. Hedghogs are also a big problem in my area due to the hazards they cause to unsuspecting drivers. I’m sick of replacing the tyres on my jaguar because they can’t learn to stay away from the Queens highway.”
The actual news article about this on the Daily Mail site is full of comments from people about how foxes kill a chicken to eat, and then kill all the others just out of spite, blah blah blah. Pretty much like cats and dogs do too, yeah?
Pet dogs and cats are constantly killing things for a laugh and leaving the stinking remains in our houses – EXTERMINATE THIS MENACE NOW.
Great article.
If you cannot be as strong as the bear be as sly as the fox- old Gaelic proverb.
The fox that visits my garden would never harm anyone. The poor thing ran away in terror once when my cat decided to go for it. We also used to have a fox and its cute wee cubs waiting in the garden every morning for my mum to put out food for them.
It’ll be terrible if all this tabloid hysteria makes people scared of foxes or serves to bolster the fox-hunting lobby. I would hope most people would have far more sense than that though.
The last paragraph has a quote from the 16th century.
Nice to see they’re using up-to-date, modern, scientific sources.
Stuart raises an important concern: this hysteria is likely being whipped up in order to build support for the Tories lifting the ban on fox-hunting
Fox hunting ban was just a ruse by the Labour scum to kid some dupes that the party was going to be looking after the interests of the working class by indulging in a bit of phoney class waaar rhetoric and an inconsequential action for working people.
BTW moral panics like this are the morras chip paper- there ll be another one along very soon for the gullible.
Im keeping my pet foxes off the streets for a couple of weeks til the heat dies down.
Fianna, we get it, you don’t like Labour. While I fucking hate Labour with a passion for all the awful things they’ve done in my lifetime, I am not going to criticise them for banning fox hunting (and while it’s inconsequential for working people, it’s not inconsequential for the foxes that weren’t ripped to shreds by posh people’s dogs for fun as a result of the ban), nor for that matter for the other good things they’ve done such as repeal section 28 and allow my mum to be legally married to her partner. Not everything they did was a ruse to dupe the working class. They don’t need to dupe the working classes, they’re pretty fucking upfront about how awful they are in other respects. Labour were upfront about their horrendous role in war mongering, ‘anti-terror’ laws, immigration racism etc, they don’t need to lie to dupe anyone. People vote Labour because they don’t want the Tories – they vote Labour IN SPITE of Labour, not BECAUSE of Labour. So now that we’ve cleared that up, can you stop banging on about Labour in every article we write? If you want to use our blogs to say how much you hate Labour then why don’t you criticise Labour in the comments sections of our ACTUAL LABOUR ARTICLES? You’ll find them here: https://ssy-archive.scottishsocialistparty.org/tag/labour/ Stop trying to pretend that we surreptitiously support Labour just because we fucking hate the Tories. Labour have nothing to do with this article, it’s about the media and it’s about foxes, okay.
Back on track, this is a decent article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/07/urban-fox-attack-london
“This fox, if it was a fox, was probably young (as they are usually born around May). It reportedly entered the house through an open door, without knowing where it was going, and probably panicked when it found itself in a room with these two infants. When a fox is stressed, it runs about a lot and it could easily have injured the children accidentally. What I am definite about is that this fox did not go “on purpose” to attack the two children; that’s simply not what foxes want to do. Any injury it caused those children would have been, in that sense, accidental.”
And this one http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jun/07/fox-attack-twins pretty much debunks this mad media outrage this quote:
“I have only heard of two cases in my 40 years of dealing with foxes, one of which turned out eventually to be a German Shepherd and the other a cat,” he told BBC Radio 4′s Today programme before the twins’ mother had described seeing the fox.”
“Neighbours of the family said the area had been “terrorised by foxes” – lololololol IRA foxes. Must be the red hair.
Aye a lot of the reactionary, imperialist and racist stuff goes down well with a big section of the Scottish working class, the other two issues you raised are less popular but they dont cost too many working class votes to be lost. BTW Sarah it was James who broadened the discussion to include the Brit governments potential for using the scare to bring back fox hunting.
Anyway i recently found out that trapped urban foxes are released into a beautiful fox sanctuary in some lush countryside where they see out there days as nature intended and they dont get shot, as i had presumed, whilst still trapped in the humane traps.
Yes, the Tory government. The Labour government wouldn’t have used it as an excuse to bring fox hunting back, because they are against fox hunting. Mentioning Labour is entirely superfluous to this issue and I’d appreciate if you used our blog to participate in discussion rather than pursue your own agenda
in reality the ban on hunting with dogs – for that’s all it was – has been pretty meaningless anyway cause they still do hunt with dogs and basically go on as they did before.
if the tories do lift it it’ll really just be a symbolic move to please their friends in the countryside alliance.
It matters to me whether fox hunting remains banned or not. I hate fox hunters and other posh animal abusers. Hunting has for centuries been used as a way of ruling class social bonding, and it’s bonding on the basis of cruelty and slaughter.
Yes Fianananananana, somebody else took the conversation on to the political consequences of this. But you’re the one who chose to try and divert it into a discussion of the nature of the Labour Party, something which is actually irrelevant to this particular issue.
There are many working class people who care about this, because working class people are capable of caring about things other than just their immediate economic interests. I don’t want to see animals ripped apart for the pleasure of the aristocracy.
Fianananananana only says it’s irrelevant to working class people because he wants to be able to keep hunting from his large country mansion.
I simply can not believe the joviality with which you have treated this serious issue. I would like to invite you to my estate where my gamekeeper will show you the damage johnny fox can do to a pheasant aviary. I can only imagine that you, unlike myself, have never suffered the embarrassment of inviting a party of distinguished guests for a weekend of brandy and sports only to find that ‘mother nature’ has beaten you to it. While your organisation is to be commended for its firm stance against the more furtive members of our squirrel population this policy urgently needs to be extended to include the red menace also.
Jack hunting has been done by the working class a fair bit as well- i hope you hate them as much as the tally ho mob.
as i live on the other side of the boarder we as a rule dont usually see eye to eye , you say Gorham i say Seaman , you say neaps i say disgusting tasting vegetable . but it warms my heart to see that morality compassion and empathy are traits we all share . at present there is a worrying amount of bad press from certain gutter publications demanding control of this spiraling problem . it is such a coincidence though in my opinion that all this has come to light prior to the government holding a free vote in parliament with regards to repealing the hunting ban that was put into place in 2004 . i realise that hunting is still a problem and enforcing the ban is an even bigger problem , it shames me to be an Englishman when a group of Hooray Henry’s in fancy dress shouting tally ho on horse back following a trained pack of killer hounds with the intent to chase and tear to pieces a live fox which is why the ban should never be lifted . as i said it is nice to know the foxes have friends North of the border , p,s my footy team is SWFC but my second team is Celtic ,,, at aint all bad footy wise up North ,,lol.
@FiaannnaannnABELLLA , please take the time to look at the tabloid coverage following the fox attack(still to be confirmed) in Hackney London . you will find that 4 foxes were trapped to date and were removed from the scene then SHOT . not worthy of a humane injection it would seem . one attack four deaths in the fox population , looks like an uneducated knee jerk reaction to me .
David i share your compassion for foxes. I feed lots of them and stop my dogs from attacking them. I know that the trapped foxes get shot and dont get sent to a lovely fox friendly sanctuary in the countryside, but thats what the man with the gun and the traps told me when he was catching the foxes. He told me he was on £2k for getting rid of four foxes.
i have a number of town foxes that visit my town garden one of which can be hand fed. i do not believe in regular feeding as they have to fend for themselves. i suspect that many people do feed them and this scare may stop them causing some foxes to go hungry. my own experience is that they have to stay fit to survive an will not attempt to attack anything that may hurt them in any way. and yes dogs do bite people so are we going to cull them?