Fantastic Mr Fox

2. The perfect day

There is some debate among zoologists as to whether the British Red Fox is a subspecies of its own. Darwin's most passionate disciple, Thomas Huxley, in a fifty-page treatise on the classification of dogs, in 1880, split his canids into two groups: the alopecoids (true foxes) and the thooids (hunting dogs, wolves). The former tended to be loners; the latter were commonly pack animals (it was in this divide that fox-hunters found their sport). Huxley formally classified the fox native to Britain as Vulpes vulpes crucigera, distinct in its head size and dentition from the common North American and European foxes, plain old Vulpes vulpes. Recent DNA work has questioned this distinction, however.

There are around 240,000 red foxes in Britain, a number that has remained nearly constant since the first population surveys of the 1960s. Foxes can live to be ten years old, though their average life expectancy in Britain is about two years. They eat pretty much anything, from mice and game birds to nuts and berries. A few foxes will attack lambs. A rural fox's territory is generally around two square miles, and there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that the population is self-regulating (during the recent foot-and-mouth crisis, when there was no hunting, the fox population remained static). About 25,000 foxes have been killed most years by fox-hunting. Around 100,000 are killed on the roads. In an NOP poll in the year 2000, the fox was voted the nation's favourite land mammal.