Shooting and fishing: Are two dead animals proof that a breed of super foxes is stalking this land?

Didn’t you just love the story about the new breed of super foxes now roaming our towns and cities, savaging poodles and snatching babies from their prams? It puts eagle owls, those other popular predators, well in the shade.

The story, as it went, went like this. Alan Hepworth, a retired butcher who lives on the Aberdeenshire/Banffshire border went out one evening after foxes.

Apart from stalking deer, stalking foxes is the love of his life. This evening, back in October he was “lamping” with his son: using a powerful beam plugged into a Land Rover which picks up the foxes’ eyes, glowing in the dark. For some reason the beam doesn’t bother them. To bring a fox into range he uses the time-honoured method of squeaking, making the noise of a small animal in distress. Some people can do it by sucking air on the back of their hand; others have a squeezy squeaker and some swear by polystyrene rubbed on glass. Either way it brings them in.

On this occasion the fox, which Alan could see was a big one, came straight in without hesitation to within 20 yards of the Land Rover. Suddenly spooked, it turned and ran, followed all the way by the lamp beam until it made the fatal mistake of stopping about 120 yards out to take stock and listen.

At the time Alan didn’t think much about it except that it was big, weighed 38lbs and 1oz, was 4ft 9ins long, almost as tall as himself. They took a photo, the one that appeared last week on TV and in all the papers, and buried the corpse. The story only emerged because Alan sent the photo to a shooting magazine.

“I suppose I should have had it stuffed,” he ruminated. This all sparked the splendidly fatuous fear that foxes are getting dangerously large as they move into towns and feed off rats, scraps, mice, pigeons or half-eaten burgers. The basis for this was that a 35lb fox had been shot last year in suburban East Grinstead, Sussex. Whether two dead animals of a certain size is proof that a breed of super foxes is stalking this land is another matter.

For a start Alan’s fox was shot five miles from the nearest village, let alone town, so its size can hardly be down to old ladies putting out bowls of dog food (in Bristol 10 per cent of residents are deliberately feeding foxes). However the biologist Christian Bergmann suggested that the further north you go the bigger animals become. In the case of a fox this may be because it hunts at night, and the nights are longer in the north. But that hardly explains the East Grinstead fox. Probably just another southern fat cat. Boom boom.