Foxes and chickens and bears

Oh, my!

We have foxes in our neighborhood. They moved in right after the town passed an ordinance allowing people to keep chickens (but not roosters) in their back yards. Had they been hanging out on the periphery the whole time, waiting for a bunch of chickens to show up? I can’t prove the connection, but circumstantially, that’s what happened—though I confess I have never seen one with an actual chicken in its mouth. What they do seem to catch on a regular basis are squirrels and bunnies.

In any case, the evolution of people’s feelings about the foxes has been fascinating to watch. The whole thing plays out—as many things do—on the neighborhood Facebook group page. In the beginning, the foxes were a novelty. It was exciting to see one crossing the street, or a whole litter of pups frolicking in somebody’s back yard. People would post pictures of their fox sightings, and other people would respond with heart emojis. But it didn’t take long for a few naysayers to jump in with warnings that the foxes are wild animals and people shouldn’t get too comfortable with them. One person would report that a fox tried to play with their dog and another would warn them that letting the fox near the dog was a bad idea. And so on.

The weirdest fox encounter we ever had was one Friday evening early in the fall. We were sitting in our driveway with a cocktail and some snacks (it’s a thing), chatting with the neighbors. We had a fire going in our little Solo stove. A woman we didn’t know came walking fast up the sidewalk, half running. It was already dark out. She looked scared. She asked us if she could stand up on our front stoop for a few minutes because a fox was chasing her. We thought this was a little bit odd, but we agreed, and she ran up our front walk and huddled under the porch lights. Sure enough, a fox came trotting up the sidewalk a moment later with a sense of purpose and approached us like it owned the place. “Back off, dude!” I warned, but unlike the woman, it wasn’t scared. We incredulously shouted a few more warnings at it, and it kind of studied us for a moment, then gave us the fox equivalent of a shrug and went on its way. The woman waited a few minutes, then shakily thanked us and left.

At first, like many neighbors, I found the foxes kind of cute and charming. But one of them now has an afternoon route through our back yard, which is less charming, especially when the cat is out enjoying a moment of sunshine. (For those who think cats only belong indoors: he’s on a leash.) Twice now he’s chased the fox off, but if that happens too many times, I’m afraid the fox is going to figure out who’s bigger.

I got to thinking about why the foxes seemed so appealing at first, and I couldn’t help wondering if it had anything to do with their literary reputation. Anthropomorphized foxes abound in children’s books. They’re usually not the good guys, but regardless of their behavior, they’re like us. Do we feel as if, in some odd way, we know them?

A menacing-looking fox sits on a fence talking to two duck sisters in a fable by Arnold Lobel, whose collection Fables won the Caldecott Medal, but it’s a story I wouldn’t read to a child today. The fox stops the ducks on their routine walk to the pond. One sister finds his conversation “gentlemanly,” but the other is on to him. She turns out to be right when the fox tries the next day to catch them in a sack. They escape, but they have to “[rest] at home to quiet their nerves” and then find a different route to the pond the following day. The moral of the story? “At times, a change of routine can be most healthful.” I’ll say!

The Little Prince meets a fox in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s strange little children’s classic. The fox begs the little prince to tame him—something he seems to conflate with friendship. I first read this book in French in high school, but even in English I’m not sure I understand it. The fox teaches the little prince that if he’s patient, day by day he’ll be able to get closer to the fox until he’s tamed. He tells the prince:

 [I]f you tame me, my life will be filled with sunshine. I’ll know the sound of footsteps that will be different from all the rest. Other footsteps send me back underground. Yours will call me out of my burrow like music.

Later, he tells the little prince a secret: “You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed.” To be honest, this has its own ring of menace for me.

I’m sure you can think of several examples of foxes in stories yourself. These are just two that are on the shelf of kids’ books I keep even though there is currently no one to read them to. Goodreads offers a list of 154 books about foxes. At the top is, not surprisingly, Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, which I recall my kids enjoyed. Or maybe it was just me who enjoyed it. The fox in Dr. Seuss’s Fox in Socks is definitely more playful than the thug on the fence talking to the ducks. Then there’s Eric Carle’s Hello, Red Fox, which features a greenish blue fox on the cover because this is really a book about seeing a negative afterimage of a picture after staring at it. There’s a cute, fluffy fox talking to a squirrel and a rabbit on the cover of Garth Williams’ beloved Baby Animals book. Those two better watch their backs.

Literally the first person to tell a fox story may have been Aesop, who, according to one website, told 28 different fables about foxes. The one I recall best is the one about the fox and the grapes. When the fox tries to reach a cluster of grapes that’s too high for him, he gives up and says they were probably sour anyway. Supposedly, it’s the origin of the expression “sour grapes.”

This whole thing we do about presenting animals to children as if the animals are human is, frankly, weird. I’ll never forget the camping trip we took to New Hampshire when my younger daughter was two years old. We pulled up near the dumpster to unload our trash, and she pointed and said, “Look at baby bear!” Yup, there was a black bear, pretty damned close. She was ready to toddle right over to it and have a conversation. She is still an animal lover, and I doubt she’d be scared of a little black bear today, either. In any case, we hustled the child who thought a bear was a potential playmate into the back of the minivan faster than you can say “honey pot.”

Maybe I’ve got it all backwards and the reason we’re drawn to the foxes isn’t because they were anthropomorphized in the books we read as children. Maybe they were anthropomorphized because adults who wrote books were drawn to them—and to all the other creatures they’d seen.

All I know is the neighbors can’t get enough of them. The latest fox post on the Facebook group page appeared two days ago. One neighbor asked where the foxes have “taken residence” this year, since she’d seen one in front of her house and in her driveway. Another neighbor offered up the inevitable laugh line based on the group’s other favorite topic: The fox and his wife bought a house on Thornton Street, he said, and they’re not happy about the tax rate, either. Ba-dum-dum.

Credit: Fox photo from—where else?—the neighborhood Facebook page, by Halina W.