29/01/2022
How Lovely 🦊
DO FOXES KILL FOR FUN?
This is something that gets brought up from time to time, particularly by the pro-hunt lobby as ironic justification for killing foxes themselves for fun. The typical scenario is the fox in the hen house, and a fox will kill all of the chickens in a shed if it gets in because of a lust for killing. In reality, this behaviour can actually be explained by a built in survival instinct in foxes in which they have an innate need to cache (store) food for times when it may be scarce.
You may have seen it yourself when you leave food out for foxes – they’ll likely pick up as much as they can fit in their mouth and carry it away to be buried/hidden away. In the unit, or with foxes in the pens, we see it when foxes bury their food bowls under shavings – every single fox we get in does this, and it’s a built in survival mechanism. With the chickens in the shed, it’s the same principle – a fox will typically kill what it can, so it has a stock of food readily available for later. It isn’t really feasible for a fox to carry away the contents of a whole chicken shed, and so the bodies are usually left there, until the unfortunate owner of said chickens finds them and removes the bodies. It’s understandable that without understanding the logic of the fox, the owner would then assume that the fox has killed them all out of pleasure.
However, as discussed above, this is not the case, and the fox just stockpiles food (in a similar way people do when they do a weekly shop at the supermarket), as by killing all chickens, it ensures they’ll all be there once it returns – though by the time it does return, the bodies will have been removed by the owner, even though the fox isn’t to know that.
We say it time and time again – it’s the responsibility of livestock owners to ensure their animals are properly protected, and this shouldn’t be difficult to do with advice and information on the best ways to do this available quite easily via a quick internet search. So, next time someone claims foxes kill for fun, inform them that that isn’t true, and they are in fact victims of humans doing this exact thing!
