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Running with the Fox
A review of a book by David MacDonald
Field biologists are a little like
hunters -- they spend inordinate amounts of time
crouched in the weeds, or jungled up in thickets, plagued
by gnats and mosquitoes, pounded by the sun, burned by
the wind and wet to the bone. And all because of some
critter.
David
MacDonald is a hunter at heart, albeit a hunter
equipped with a Yagi directional-antenna in one hand, and
a pair of infra-red binoculars in the other. After more
than 25 years of tracking red foxes through farm, fell,
forest, suburb, desert and inner city, he is also the
preeminent fox biologist in the world.
Running
With the Fox is his masterpiece.
MacDonald
writes as someone who has spent decades studying foxes --
indeed, one wonders if he ever sleeps, as he seems to be
out most nights searching for any of a dozen or more
animals he has radio-collared.
MacDonald
is a population biologist and his goal is to understand
the dynamics of fox life, from food and mating to
migration and mortality. Over the course of almost 30
years of study, he has raised many fox litters from
whelps and has seen many of those same animals crushed by
cars, snared by keepers, shot by farmers, accidentally
butchered by combines, or perish from disease or abuse
inflicted by other fox or feral dogs.
In the
wild, few things ever die of old age or in their sleep.
Despite
all, the fox not only persists but thrives.
How is
that possible?
The
simple answer is that fox are very secretive and very
adaptable. Not only can they thrive on a hundred
different food sources, but what foods they eat are
rarely missed by man.
Combine
that with a nocturnal lifestyle, a natural (and well
deserved!) fear of humans and dogs, and an almost
supernatural sense of hearing, smell and sight, and it
turns out that fox are rarely seen, whether they are
cruising the edges of farms, suburban yards, or small
woods.
Sprinkled
throughout Running with the Fox are amazing
tidbits of information gleaned from examining scores of
thousands of fox scats and observing vulpines in every
kind of habitat, from Iceland to Israel, and from
downtown Oxford to the woods of Canada's national parks.
A few summary points:
- Foxes
eat a lot of earthworms. To
hear some folks talk, you would think a fox was
the size of a wolf and largely dined on sheep and
chickens. In fact, the average fox is just 12 to
14 pounds and lives on a diet composed mostly of
mice, voles, insects, fruit, young rabbits,
diseased birds, and scavenged food ranging from
fried chicken found at parks to roadkill gleaned
from medians, to bird seed spilled from garden
bird feeders. Earthworms, it turns out, comprise
20 to 35 percent of fox diet in many pasture-rich
areas where worms come up in high densities on
moist nights with little wind. Previous studies
of fox diet have missed earthworms as a key
component because observers did not have
night-visions goggles and did not do microscopic
analysis of fox scat to find the thousands of
tiny chatae which are the scale-like growths
worms use to move through the soil.
- Hunting
foxes has increased their global numbers. As
paradoxical as it sounds, no human action has
been as beneficial to the red fox as the mounted
hunt. The reason for this is simple: fox hunting
has bestowed on fox an economic and cultural
value, and mounted hunts are so terribly
inefficient that they do not do much to suppress
fox populations. Not only did the mounted hunts
import red fox to North America and Australia --
where they have thrived in spectacular numbers --
but they also led the charge to ban efficient
traps and poisons in the UK. Indeed, the highly
pejorative term "vulpicide"
specifically means the killing of fox by means other
than with hounds and terriers. As mounted hunts
gained in popularity, fox coverts were planted
and maintained on UK farms and estates,
artificial breeding earths were constructed, and
fox were live-trapped and moved into areas where
they had been depleted. The result is that across
the UK -- and across the world -- there are now
far more red fox running about than there were
just 150 years ago.
- Foxhunting
is not the most cruel way to die. MacDonald
notes that most kinds of "natural"
death are cruel, and that immortality is not an
option for the fox. Is "natural"
starvation, disease or predation more cruel, or
less cruel, than an "unnatural" death
by hunting, which is likely to be swift and sure?
MacDonald notes that "If hunting stopped,
the same number of foxes, or even more, would be
killed by people using other methods such as
traps, poison, snares or night-shooting," as most fox that are
purposely terminated in the UK are on bird-shoot
estates where the fox is in direct competition
with the "excess" birds released into
the wild. As MacDonald notes, hunters are willing
to pay £10 a bird -- fox are not.
- Foxes
do almost no damage to sheep populations. After
spending countless hours observing fox in sheep
country, often at night and through infra-red
goggles, MacDonald concludes that fox are not
very fond of mutton and that they do very little
predation on live lambs. Given almost any kind of
alternative food source -- rabbits, bird seed,
worms, baby birds, fruit or roadkill -- a fox
will give sheep a pass. When fox do eat sheep,
they tend to focus on already-dead detritus --
sheep testicles that drop off into the field
after castrating bands are applied (MacDonald
notes that he often finds fox feces containing
these same undigested rubber bands), after birth,
and even sheep dung from young lambs -- the
latter loaded with still-undigested milk
products. MacDonald does not deny that fox may
kill a few very young (and perhaps already
fatally weak) sheep, but such attacks are so rare
they have never been filmed and are statistically
negligible. MacDonald notes that in the fell and
upland regions, where fear of fox predation is
highest, sheep mortality is often 25% with many
lambs born starving due to over-grazing abetted
by a government policy that subsidizes
overly-dense sheep production. With ewes in poor
feed, and lambs borne wet on cold and windy
slopes without shelter, lamb mortality is very
high without any fox participation at all. The
fact that fox, on occasion, scavenge the
already-dead does little harm to the living.
- Fox
control has very little impact on total fox
population numbers. Fox
hunting with hounds and terriers is not very
efficient, and MacDonald believes it does no real
harm to overall fox populations. While some very
heavily 'keepered shooting estates may be able to
knock down fox populations over a small area, so
many young fox migrate outward to find new ground
every year that, absent constant trapping,
shooting and digging (which is done on some
shooting estates) the population balance is
quickly restored. In the UK, fox hunting of all
kinds removes about 1 fox per 6.7 square
kilometers a year -- enough to encourage more
breeding, but too low a number to actually reduce
the fox population. Notes MacDonald,
"foxhunting is of minor significance to
foxes in particular, or amongst wildlife issues
generally." In short, almost any other
environmental issue or impact is more important
to fox welfare than foxhunting.
- Fox
hunting may benefit the environment. MacDonald
notes that with the rise of mounted hunts, more
fox coverts were planted and farmers began to be
paid to not poison or trap them. The result has
been an increase in the number of fox in the UK
over the course of the last 150 years. In a
survey of 800 farmers, MacDonald also discovered
that those who were enthusiastic foxhunters had
removed 35% less hedgerows than the average
farmer during the 1970s -- apparently because of
their desire to produce good fox habitat.
- There
is very little moral distinction between fox
hunting and eating fish or owning a cat. MacDonald
does not recoil at the idea of fox hunting, and
finds it morally indistinguishable from such
common activities as eating fish or owning a cat.
He notes that "people's gastronomic
enjoyment outweighs their concern for the
consequences of harvesting billions of fish
annually, as their enjoyment of their cat's
companionship outweighs regret at the deaths of
millions of hedgerow birds annually."
- While
fox predation on farm stock may do very little
economic harm, hunting of foxes may present some
economic benefits. While fox
do very little damage to sheep, they do cut in to
the number of "surplus" birds on lands
where they are stocked for hunting. MacDonald is
impressed by the economics of the shoots. He
notes that "the game shooting industry is
probably largely responsible for the frequently
unpleasant deaths of 100,000 fox annually in
Britain, but against these must be weighed the
fact that this industry provides the major
incentive for habitat conservation on farmland.
In Britain, in 1982, it was estimated to generate
more than £200 million worth of consumer
expenditure and a game 'bag' valued at £17
million. There is an argument that game shooting
is the greatest hope for conservation on modern
farms, but that predators of game are the
sacrifice required to secure the land."
Against the economics of bird hunting, MacDonald
weighs the economics of mounted fox hunting
(which seek to protect fox in order to chase
them), a pastime which, in the UK, is enjoyed by
over 200,000 people and which results in over
2,600 full-time jobs, and many more thousands of
part-time or associated jobs, ranging from
farriers to vets. In actuality, it appears both
bird-shoots and mounted fox hunts preserve land,
and that the large estates can be managed for fox
or birds without having much impact on overall
fox or bird numbers -- a win/win for the
environment, and therefore a win for fox and
birds as well.
Running with Fox
by David MacDonald can be ordered from
www.abebooks.com or www.anglebooks.com
"See
You next week."
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