My exposure to fox hunting was entirely via television and, in particular, the movie Mary Poppins. Like most children who saw that movie, I was greatly distressed for the poor, bedraggled fox with the Irish accent being chased by the haughty Englishmen and their dogs. How horribly unsporting it seemed! And what a relief when Bert saved the little guy from certain, unnecessary and inhumane death! (The movie appealed to my American senses even further when the little red fox referred to the British hunters as “redcoats.” As an American, I knew that something must be afoul if “redcoats” were involved).
Well into adulthood, I held firm to my opinion of fox hunts. They were inhumane, unnecessary and unsporting and were perpetrated by arrogant elites and dandies who couldn’t be bothered to do “real hunting” in that it might muss up their outfits and ruin their manicures.
And then, I went up against a fox.
We live in a bustling suburban neighborhood and have had chickens in our backyard for many years now. We’ve had our troubles with predators. Hawks were more of a problem until we grew up a large sunflower forest that takes up a quarter of our backyard and provides the chickens with plenty of cover. We rarely have hawk attacks now. We had some trouble with possums and maybe raccoons until the chickens took to sleeping in the redbud trees near our back porch at night. That seemed to keep us free of any further predatory problems.
And then one day, one of our chickens disappeared without a trace. Here and there, she would flutter into our neighbor’s yard, but never for long and was always back when she heard the call of feeding time. We searched everywhere and couldn’t find so much as one of her feathers.
The next day, our dog woke us with his barking at two in the morning. It took me a moment to get up and oriented to go and see what he was barking at. I opened the back door and all was quiet. My dog ran out to investigate, but didn’t seem to come up with any of what had bothered him. While letting him back in, I noticed our Buff Orpington, who usually slept on the smoker, was not in her customary spot. I stepped out onto the patio to look for her and was horrified to find a pile of feathers on the ground behind the smoker. I looked around, but found her nowhere. Unable to do anything further in the dark, I eventually went back to bed to get some restless sleep and survey the crime scene in the light of morning.
In the daylight, I could see the pile of feathers and a trail of them that led out of the gate on the north side of our house. The gate was open. Had that been open? Maybe we’d left it open and the first chicken wandered out and then something wandered in and got Buffy? Considering her size and the fact that it took her body with it, we made the assumption that it was a fox. We had red foxes in the area and that was probably the only local predator that could carry away a chicken that big and under such stealth.
The other chickens seemed unaffected by the attack, aside from the fact that they all moved higher up into the trees.
We weren’t even sure if the first one had been attacked as well, but if she was, both she and Buffy slept down on the smoker. That must have been what made them vulnerable, we conjectured. The gate was now secure and wired shut. We assumed that the chickens in the trees were well out of reach of the attacker.
There was no incursion that night, lulling us into a false sense of security that the others would be fine. We now thought our theory bore out. The chickens were safe in the trees.
Then we lost another one. We found some of her little black feathers under the gate where it had dragged her underneath.
At this point, my gentle, animal-loving family had been worked into a pitchfork carrying mob that wanted blood. If that fox had showed its face, I most definitely could not have assured its safety. There were even a couple of volunteers asking to stay up all night and stand guard with a bow and arrow or a BB gun or a slingshot. Our testosterone-riddled middle schooler wanted to await the chicken murderer with a machete. Our youngest little animal-loving princess kept telling us the fox was going to hell. For her, this was an out-of-character assumption. Usually, for her, everything went to heaven. Be it our old, sweet border collie or the roly poly she accidentally squished while petting it.
My husband quieted the bloodlust with his calming wisdom. “This animal is coming into our backyard and snatching our chickens out from under us. It’s very violating and it creates a feeling of helplessness. Your reaction to these feelings is with anger at the thing causing them and that’s a perfectly normal reaction. But let’s remember that the fox isn’t evil or out to get us. It’s just an animal and he just wants to eat. We shouldn’t be exacting our revenge on him. Perhaps we could try and trap him?”
The children’s barbarous clamoring temporarily subsided.
We researched trapping the fox and read that they are notoriously difficult to catch if one isn’t an experienced trapper. And experienced trappers didn’t have great luck either. Even if we did manage to trap one, what would we then do with it?
“Beat it over the head with a club,” came one suggestion.
“Throw it in the pool to drown it,” came another.
“Shoot it out of a cannon into a volcano!” came yet another.
The latter suggestion came from my youngest who, not long ago during story time, was telling me how “toot” she thought foxes were. (“Toot” meaning cute). It was interesting to see that in only a couple of days, foxes had hit rock bottom in her esteem and the esteem of the entire house. We were, without a doubt, now an anti-fox household.
While trying to figure out how to outfox the fox, we lost one more chicken and then my husband said probably our only option in this battle was to “harden the target.”
“If we can’t beat the enemy, we’ll make it harder for the enemy to beat us.”
He and the kids spent the day reinforcing the already fortress of a coop they’d built early in the summer that the chickens hadn’t really used yet on account of it being so hot and their aforementioned habit of preferring the trees in summer. At dusk, we went out into the yard with ladders to snatch the birds out of the trees and chase them around in order to put them into the coop. It took an hour and many scrapes and bruises to chase each one down. (The fox was trying to kill them; we were trying to protect them. It would have been nice if they’d fought the fox half as hard as they were fighting us). Once inside, doors were barricaded with boards, heavy rocks, chicken wire and barbed wire. My youngest son dug a small moat around it.
I’m happy to report, all the chickens survived the night. And now that our quiet little chicken paradise has been invaded by this most elusive of intruders, I guess we’ll have to imprison our chickens each night for their own safety.
I can also report that I am no longer against fox hunting. Our chickens do provide us with eggs, but our city doesn’t allow us to keep enough chickens to entirely feed our family. We have to augment our egg supply with the purchase of additional eggs. Our chickens are more pets than necessity. Back in the olden days, however, they had to rely on their chickens and eggs for their daily food. They didn’t have supermarkets. If a fox started killing off the flock of an olden day family, they might have to go without eating. Coupled with the consideration that anti-fox technology wasn’t very far along back then, I think it was reasonable for the men in the village to get together and hunt the little beasties that were stealing the food meant for the men’s children. And considering that anti-fox technology still hasn’t progressed much and I am missing four beloved feathered friends, I can’t say I’d be sad if the neighborhood fellas gathered together on their riding lawn mowers and went out on a little modern day American suburban fox hunt.
When expressing my disapproval of fox hunting, I was, as C.S. Lewis would say, behaving as a chronological snob. I was looking down on what people were doing in days past and assuming that my own ideas and notions in my own time were superior. In fact, this situation made me wonder how differently I might look at other things in history if I only had their full context. What else had I been culturally snobbish about? In what other ways did the peasantry of yore know better than the moral sages and animated movie makers of today?
Once I had a little context, I could completely understand why there might be roving gangs of men riding around the countryside hunting down those sly little critters. And after dealing with a fox myself, and reading many, many posts about other people’s dealings with them, I’m not sure a large group of men on horses with dogs and guns versus the fox is as unfair as I had erroneously thought. Truth be told, if there were odds on Polymarket, I might put my money on the fox.
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