The Hunt for the Golden Mole by Richard Girling Page B

literature is full of their misdemeanours.
    So, too, are some of Britain’s more excitable newspapers. As foxes range ever deeper into towns and cities, so the stories darken – no longer the moral fables of Aesop, but cautionary tales scrawled in blood. There is fear in the streets. At one end of the emotional spectrum the fox is a lovable rogue, to be held in awe, welcomed into our wipe-clean, over-manicured lives as our closest contact with the truly wild. At the other, it is a sly, disease-ridden sadist. (Scarcely believable as I type this, afoxhunt trots jauntily past my office – example par excellence of our jangled attitudes.) I am reminded of the front page of England’s Sun newspaper from 24 July 1987, which reported that a prisoner at an Essex police station had ‘ SNARLED and howled with his lips curled back, CROUCHED on all fours, FOAMED at the mouth and LEAPT at police with his hands and fingers rigid in the shape of claws’. Headline:
    WEREWOLF
    SEIZED
    IN SOUTHEND
    This is a classic of the ‘man bites dog’ genre, news simply because it’s so preposterous. In the same way, it is the very rarity of fox attacks on humans that ensures big headlines when they occur. As with murder, there is a perverse logic at work. Incidences are too few to translate into a calculable risk, but it is their very rarity that puts them in the news and creates the illusion of danger. A cornered fox may bite if it feels threatened – typically it will deliver a cautionary nip and back off – but it won’t go looking for trouble. If you examine a fox skull, you’ll find it’s small and delicate, with teeth that seem surprisingly insubstantial until you remember that they evolved to eat mice. Foxes are only slightly heavier than cats, and usually come off worse in fights. For this reason they tend to steer clear of them. The average home territory of an urban fox is half a square kilometre, which means that it overlaps with some 250 pet or feral cats. In Bristol, which until the mange epidemic of the 1990s had the highest density of foxes anywhere in the world, each fox on average is responsible for 0.17 cat-deaths per year – negligible when compared to the numbers ill-met by cars. Most foxes never kill one at all. Violent interactions with humansare exponentially rarer even than this – a handful a year, but with every drop of spilt blood making news. Compare this with dogs. Every day in the US, a thousand people need emergency treatment for dog bites. In England it’s more than five thousand a year, but it takes a dead child to turn one into a story. As I have discovered, there is no surer way of guaranteeing hate mail in Britain than to write something antagonistic about dogs, their breeders or owners; and no easier way to curry public favour than to write something prejudicial about foxes.
    In a way, this is the least of the ironies. Thanks to television, most people now can recognise many more animals than were known to our nineteenth-century forebears, for whom ‘nature’ was the visible hand of God. No one without top hat, frock coat and beard would have known an echidna from a pangolin, or a tenrec from a hedgehog, or been certain that a whale was not a fish. Now we are both more familiar with and more remote from our co-inhabitants of the planet. Wildlife has been put on the other side of a screen, odourless and with an orchestral backingtrack. It’s a glimpse, not an experience, an incidental contributor to the urban mindset that puts people and wildlife into a divided world of ours and theirs. The fox here stands for the whole of nature. We love it, but we don’t want to share our space with it. It is at once ubiquitous and alien, to be feared as well as loved. Every time a fox, rightly or wrongly, is blamed for some urban outrage, the cry goes up for a cull. The populist mayor of London, Boris Johnson, was at it again in early 2013 when a