Sly Tod

In 1776 Pennant described ‘three varieties of foxes found in the mountaious parts of these islands, which differ a little in form but not in colour.’ And at Campsie in Stirling in the Old Statistical Account [OSA] ‘the huntsman says that there are three different kinds peculiar to Britain. The gray-hound fox, with the long bushy tail, white on top, skulks on the fells and is particularly destructive to lambs. The other two species lurk in the woods and old coal pits; the one is low and thick made,of a very dark brown; the other very small, of a lively red and a black tip on its tail; the last one is most mischievous to poultry.

Writing of its sagacity Lister-Kaye said: ‘ the fox has accumulated such an extraordinary amount of folk lore and fable; no other animal has so versatile a reputation. The stories range from the outer borders of possibility to the fantastic and ridiculous. The credits include supreme intelligence, resourcefulness and cunning; the accusations, wanton killing and Maachiavellian villainry.’ To which the Victorian sportsman Charles St John added: ‘I can believe almost any story of his power of deceiving and inveigling animals into his clutches. Nor does his countenance belie him; for, handsome animal as he certainly is, his face is the very type and personification of cunning.'

James Irvine Robertson quotes two letters to The Field in 1958 : ‘A fox was seen carrying something white in its mouth beside a pond. He entered the water backwards and on reaching the centre he very slowly sank out of sight, leaving the white object on the surface. Emerging from the opposite side, he shook himself and trotted off. When the white object was retrieved it was found to be sheep’s wool and it was swarming with fleas. The second letter reported the same observation again involving sheep’s wool from Asiatic Turkey.'

In the report for Weem in the OSA “the foxes before the year 1760 made great havoc among the sheep, goats etc; but from that time, regular fox-hunters have been employed at fixed salaries, by whose diligence and skill vast numbers of foxes have been destroyed; their number is now greatly reduced,.”

However despite its bad reputation for taking lambs and poultry examination of stomach contents of dead foxes since the loss of the rabbit reveals rats, mice and other small rodents, frogs and invertebrates also taken. Despite this in Scotland the fox holds the first place among vermin and in the Breadalbane vermin list of 1891-1901 562 old and 674 young foxes were killed.

St John held that the surest way of destroying foxes is by poison ... ‘the most artistic (!) way is to insert three or four grains of ‘strychna’ into the body of a rabbit or crow. [This poison, he adds, can be generally be obtained from any respectable druggist]. It is needless to give a warning against using this powerful drug rashly, as no man in his senses would place it anywhere but in the most secure situations.’

To this day it is almost impossible, especially in hill sheep areas, to have a serious discussion on foxes this side of hysteria ...but the fox is the major carrier of wild life rabies in Europe. Rabies spread among wild foxes from an outbreak in Poland in 1939. The disease among foxes travelled westward at about 25 mles a year reaching the Low Countries in the 1960s and by 1980 18600 cases had been reported in Europe only three of which occurred in man.

Robin Hull