The new cub in town

The nation is split regarding urban foxes but one thing is for sure — no amount of easy pickings will stop them predating on our cherished species

- Mike Swan

Your dogs won’t like it when they come to stay; that kennel stinks,” said my father almost 40 years ago. He had given up keeping dogs by then, but there was still a kennel at the bottom of his garden so he could board mine when I was going away.

Dad was a keen vegetable gardener and if there was one thing that would really wind him up it was the neighbours’ cats, or in this case a vixen, digging in his carefully prepared onion bed. This particular year the crop rotation brought the onions right alongside the kennel, so he had “left a lamb bone from Sunday lunch in it, rigged a figure-of-four trip to hold the door open, and stretched a bungee to snap it shut”. One night was all it took, and bingo.

When we moved into Ash Vale in 1963, it seemed like a quiet village in rural Surrey, even if there were neighbours who commuted to London every day on the train. Twenty years later and pretty much all the spare land had been developed into housing estates, leaving the adjacent Army training ground as the only real green space. Suddenly we were in perfect urban fox country.

Phenomenon

It is easy to think that urban foxes are a new phenomenon, but records of foxes in towns go back to the 1890s in Switzerland and the 1930s in London. What brought them there? There are lots of urban folk who love to have foxes about, but those who don’t often ask why they don’t go back to the countryside, “where they belong”.