A fun video from Norway where these two are the subject of a children's book designed to raise opposition to the captive-fox fur trade.
Ironically, this video may cause misery if people are lead to believe that these animals are nothing more than a cute forest dog. They aren't. Fox make rotten pets as they have scent glands that will stink up the house, and they will pee any time and anywhere. Because pet fox almost universally lead short, brutal lives at the hands of ignorant people who later abandon them to the wild to starve, owning a pet fox is generally illegal in the U.S. unless a state-license is issued.
This fox actually lives outside and I gather that the fox is free to come and go as it wishes. That might be great in this location in Norway, but in most places a tame fox is going to be shot as a suspect for rabies, or it will end up dead in a week or two because it's simply too easy a target for less forgiving people and dogs.
4 comments:
Owning a pet fox is illegal in the US? That's not what I understood to be the case. I was under the impression that it was a state to state issue, unless there was something passed quite recently that I am unaware of and that some casual googling did not bring up.
Case in point, this article from popular science from 2012 talks specifically about Indiana and Maine: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-10/fyi-domesticated-foxes
"But not Indiana! Indiana has three classes of wild animals. Class 1 is mostly squirrels. Class 2 includes foxes, beavers, skunks, raccoons, coyotes, and weasels. Class 3 includes "venomous reptiles," and all species of bear, big cat, and wolf. All three classes are legal!
[...] It's worth noting that Maine is even more lenient than Indiana; the only real law in Maine is that wild animals have to have an identification tag."
And this exotic animal website has both a searchable set of state laws and a list of national laws: http://www.bornfreeusa.org/b4a2_exotic_animals.php
If you were talking specifically about the non-wild domesticated foxes from Siberia, the above article from popsci covers what I thought was the truth, in as much that the imports are legal but complicated.
I am in no way advocating foxes as pets (not because of any judgement on people living out their fox fantasies, but rather that I don't think foxes' needs can be met well in a captive situation) and if I am incorrect, I would like to know.
That and the fact that when you see inter-species "friendships" it's not always or even often actually "friendship". It can be, oh, things like Toxoplasmosis: http://guardianlv.com/2013/09/cats-mice-and-toxoplasma-gondii-parasite-weird-love-triangle/
Anthropomorphizing can lead to bad judgements in regards to animals (See: dogs treated like children instead of respected as dogs, toxoplasmosis, or that "sadness and love in birds" email that went around of a swallow that was "sad" it lost it's mate but in reality was a photoset documenting swallows engaging in necrophilia...)
Thanks Stacey -- I seem to have cut off the last part of that sentence when editing to get rid the weird bit of "white code" that appears in some blog posts. Fixed it. As I have noted in the past, almost everything is legal in Texas, including wolves. That said, most other states either ban owning wild animals (as Alaska does) or require permits which may require inspections, fees, an yearly inventory reporting.
If anyone familiar with blogger knows what the white code is about, shoot me an email. It is not visible on a desk top, but shows up on the cell phone version, and I have to go into the code and strip it out by hand. Ridiculous!
This is the "white hightlight" problem that blogger has NOT fixed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fwev1qwEp3o
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