Don't cull the fox asleep in my garden!

Day off today and when I got home at lunch time there was a fox wandering around my garden. It is now curled up asleep near my pond.

I have had foxes asleep  in the garden in the summer before. Today it is cold, with small patches of snow still not melted, so I am surprised it wants to sleep in the open today.

The attack on another baby is putting foxes in danger of culling which would do no good at all. Foxes control their own numbers, with the lead pair having the cubs and the number of cubs depending on death rates and amount of food available. In cities full of that dirty, wasteful pest, the human species, there is a lot of food so a high density of foxes. Kill foxes leaving the food source and the fox population will not decrease. This is what happened when councils were paying bounties to pest controllers years ago. it cost a lot and achieved nothing.

I wouldn't want a sudden wipe-out of all waste food which would mean a lot of hungry foxes, but a steady decrease of it would help reduce the number of foxes, and rats too.

I don't think a fox would never attack a baby, but the stories of the attacks we have heard in recent years don't seem logical. I did hear on the radio the other morning a young woman who had a fox attack her leg. I believed her, and wonder whether that is one that has been tamed and had then escaped or been let loose, otherwise why would a fox do that?

All those politicians thinking they can win support by damning the fox ought to be careful. We have the problem now of many people feeding foxes. Do they want pictures in the papers of tearful children because "their" fox has been murdered? The feeding of foxes will be a huge stumbling block in any attempt to reduce the food supply to reduce their numbers.

If only they had done something about our messy, wasteful habits years ago, instead of waiting till too late! But that is fairly typical of how society treats problems.