You'd better get used to living with the urban fox

Ever since that great comic polemicist Paul Johnson announced, not so long ago, that he was to be nicer and kinder in what he wrote, his writing has become a wondrous thing. Most weeks, he will choose a species from nature – the oak or the magpie, most recently it was the honey bee – report on its character in the wild (dignified, aggressive, socially self-abasing), dig out a couple of quotes and reach a gentle and wise conclusion about what it all teaches us humans.

An essay will open with the words, "When I am looking at the poultry in Somerset, I am not idle. I am thinking." Presumably, at some point, Johnson has thought about the ways of the fox but even he, I suspect, would be hard pressed to summarise the many and various ways in which this extraordinary mammal has come to exemplify the changing face of modern Britain. Like a living metaphor, adapting itself week by week to changing circumstances, Old Charley, as we hunters affectionately call him, has recently found himself the focus of debates concerning class, the countryside, spin, and the clash of old versus new Labour.

Last week, he was at the centre of a new area of controversy and paranoia. Predictably, he (or, more likely at this time of year, she) has taken a new familiarity with humankind one stage further by strolling into a suburban house and snacking on the face of a baby.

Nothing in this behaviour is particularly surprising. Old Charley is a versatile, opportunist predator, whose appetites are constrained only by fear. It has not taken long for him to discover that man, virtually his only natural enemy, is now more likely to offer him a saucer of Whiskas than shoot him. So, very sensibly, he takes advantage.

This shocking behaviour was discussed on the Today programme. The baby's father, who took an understandable hanging's-too-good-for-them attitude, was taken to task by a well-meaning fox preservationist. Clearly, said the fox's friend, this particular individual must have been suffering from some kind of mental crisis – concussion, perhaps. The fact that the fox failed to turn tail and run when discovered was unnatural, he argued (wrongly, as it happens).

More of this is inevitable. The combined effect of gloopy suburbanites treating foxes as pets and the lengthy suspension of hunting during the foot-and-mouth outbreak has caused a serious fox epidemic, in towns and the country.

Within the past few weeks, both my brother and my parents have lost all their hens to invasions – nothing too unusual in that, perhaps, except that their neighbours have reported a similar increase in attacks. The hen-loving novelist Deborah Moggach and her daughter Lottie suffered identical tragedies, in Hampstead and Kentish Town, on the same night last week.

It almost goes without saying that Charley will be in even better shape if hunting is banned. Some defenders of the sport have argued that relatively few foxes are killed by hounds; the truth is that the real culls take place, on the quiet and out of sight, before the hunting season starts, during what is called cubbing.

As numbers grow, the view of foxes as our cuddly, bushy-tailed friends in the wild will become more difficult to sustain. Bored with hens and dustbins, they will take to wandering into houses in search of more succulent prey. The braver local councils will have to recognise that, if the brown rat is regarded as a pest and a health hazard to humans, then so should the fox.

But how to control their numbers? Poison? Gas? Vigilante squads of angry fathers, roaming the suburbs, toting rifles and shotguns having proved to be hopelessly inadequate for the job? The Today programme had better keep the telephone number of their fox preservationist handy because he will soon need to be back in the studio, either defending the eating habits of his favourite animal or deploring the ways it is being killed.

It will be a fascinating debate because at some point it will have to be recognised that wild animals are not susceptible to conscience, and that the faintly ridiculous, traditional way of controlling their numbers was more effective and humane than what had appeared to be cleaner, less socially reprehensible alternatives.

Some, of course, will continue to maintain that the environment has a way of balancing species numbers in a natural way, that sarcoptic mange will do its deadly work. Besides, they say, even if more foxes are around, their growing fondness for young catmeat – my friend and neighbour Roger Deakin recently watched a family of foxes playing with the corpse of a kitten in his field – will certainly help reverse the decline in numbers of songbirds.

All the same, despite his useful work in the kitten-killing area, our tolerance of the delinquency of Old Charley has probably gone quite far enough.

terblacker@aol.com