Joanna Lumley has said she likes to feed foxes in her garden. She buys them dog food. They must be cultured foxes, because they hang out in Lumley’s music room listening to her husband, composer Stephen Barlow, play the piano. Lumley has taken a risk with this disclosure. Admitting you feed foxes is a bit like admitting you feed pigeons. You may as well stop speaking to your neighbours, because you have chosen to live among the animals instead. Popular opinion sees such nurturing of wildlife as sad and antisocial. But Lumley does not seem lonely. What is the attraction of feeding foxes?
“It’s the sheer beauty of the animal. I think we all – most of us – like to feel close to nature at some point,” says Sally Beggs, who runs the Urban Fox Defenders Facebook page. “To be very close to a beautiful animal that is essentially very shy is something quite special.”
In the north London suburb of Enfield, Beggs used to feed foxes three nights a week. “When they wandered through the garden, everybody rushed to the window. The dog’s ears would prick up. We never got used to that thrill.”
But city foxes are divisive, and feeding them can upset the neighbours. That is often when Tom Keightley, a pest control expert with 35 years’ experience, gets a call. “Every job I’ve ever been on, some neighbour has been feeding them,” he says. By “job”, Keightley means an authorised kill with a .22 rifle. “The foxes feel secure because they have a den site and regular food.” As a result, they lose “that natural respect of humans”, which he believes is an essential component of happy human-animal cohabitation.
Keightley doesn’t dislike foxes. “I see one now and again in my garden. Which is the way it should be. I can look at it and say, ‘Oh, that’s nice.’ The moment it craps in my garden, it’s gone.” A fox-disliking neighbour needs no permission from a fox-loving neighbour to order a fox assassination. They can just call Keightley, with his livery-less van, and the problem disappears. (At least until another fox moves in – but maybe he or she will have better manners.)
Beggs has recently moved out of the city, and now the foxes she sees near King’s Lynn are all dead in the road. She still remembers her first close encounter with them, driving into Enfield after a festival. “It was the early hours of Monday morning. Suddenly the headlights picked out four cubs playing in the middle of the road. It was absolutely beautiful. They just stood there, looking at us. It was then that I realised that there was a local community.” She misses them. But, she says, she feeds the birds instead.
