The fox population has undoubtedly fallen dramatically since the Hunting Act 2004 and up here in the Borders, Hunts would be hard pressed to find a fox, were venery allowed.This is the same sad story across the country and a recent survey by The British Trust For Ornithology indicates that the red fox population has crashed by between 20% and 50%, depending on region. A crowning success story for the League Against Cruel Sports, but then, the welfare of the the red fox was never a consideration in their ambition to ban hunting.
Rabbit numbers fall by four-fifths since 1995
Figures from the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) show that the rabbit population across the UK as a whole has fallen by around 60 per cent.The Mammal Society, which is dedicated to the conservation of all mammals, now wants people to report sightings of the animals.
The graph below makes is visual.
What's going on?
Simple: rabbit disease.
The main culprits are two types of viral Haemorrhagic Disease (VHD and VGD2), as well as the old scourge of Old World rabbits: Myxomatosis.
Fox numbers are down because a main source of sustenance has disappeared due to rabbit and hare disease.
The gentleman in me naturally assumes, as a default position, that Johnny Scott is a fine man and a good writer and know his stuff. But if he really knows his stuff then this piece is a deliberate lie, which is not a mistake but a dedicated attempt to steer people away from the truth.
Which is not to say it is entirely wrong, only that it leaves out most of the story. Mr. Scott writes that:
Even vast areas of the Cheviot now have totally artificial commercial pheasant and partridge shooting on ground that never had a single pheasant or partridge before.
Keepers are under enormous pressure to provide big bags and exterminating foxes is seen as a priority. The courtesy of a closed season, historically part of venery, is never considered and the simplest method of maximising the reduction of fox numbers is to kill milky vixens. Not only that, but keepers now have vastly improved technology – night vision scopes and heat seeking equipment etc. A dog fox who loses his vixen during the breeding season, invariable turns rogue and farmers who were previously more than happy to leave fox control to the Hunts, now take matters into their own hands, with the inevitable increase in wounded foxes dying an excruciating, lingering death.
Yes, this is mostly true.
Mostly.
Pheasants are an imported bird in the UK, so no land can claim them as native.
Fox predation IS a threat to potted game bird populations; there's no question on that score.
Nor is there any question that night vision and infrared scopes, powerful lamps, and fox callers make shooting fox, even at night, far more lethally efficient, even if it does leave a significant number of fox crippled to die in pain the hedge.
But a dead "milky vixen" does not "invariably" result in a dog fox turning "rogue". What does that even mean? It's not said, but the suggestion is that this is how fox become lamb killers, There's just two little jokers in the deck:
- A milky vixen has cubs on milk and they will not eat lamb and will simply die if their dam is killed, and;
- With 15-25 percent lamb mortality in the absence of ALL predators, due to still births, mis-mothering, and high neo-natal mortality rates due to selection for twinning ewes, poor nutrition, cold weather, and no shelter provided, no fox has to look hard to find a bit of lamb to scavenge this time of year. It says quite a bit that despite the now-ubiquitous presence of cheap game cameras and those very same same low-light and infrared scopes and cameras that Ms. Scott decries, no footage exists of a fox killing a lamb. I'm not saying it's never happened, only that it's so rare that we have more footage of Big Foot and Nessie than we do of this supposedly common occurrence.
In the end, we have the same complaint from the mounted hunts that we've always had, which is that they want to see inefficient fox killing with a maximum of horse work involved. Fair enough. The mounted hunts have always see the game bird shoots, and the gun-based fox killing that goes with it, as competition for rural dollars as well as rural fox.
Nothing wrong with complaining about the competition, and I quite agree that terrier and hound work is more humane, more focused, and a great deal less efficient than shooting, trapping, or poisoning, and I have said so many times.
But let's not say fox numbers are in free fall because of shooters, when in fact it's a rabbit population crash due to disease that has driven the decline.
Get the facts right, then you can distort them all you want!
1 comment:
Living in the Taw Valley (Tarka the Otter country) North Devon, Uk driving the country roads and treading the fields of North Devon in the dawn and dusk hours milking cows for local farms for the last 34 years, what I see is plenty of rabbits, hares have become more of a regular sight (we still have a bit of pagan about us in this area and killing hares seems to be frowned on for the best part), fox sightings have gone down a bit and badger sightings have gone up massively. Hedgehogs are a very rare sighting, as a child hedgehogs certainly were more regularly seen.
We have an abundance of Common Buzzards, which is often a good indicator of the amount of rabbits about. Often see ten or more circling above are home, over the valley. We even have started seeing Kites in our area flying across from South Wales. Last year I even got to see two Polecat kits playing whilst walking the dogs in the early hours. Polecats were thought to be extinct in this area, but have started to be seen again. I can only hope the game keeper for the area they were in did not find them out.
Pheasants fill the gap for foxes if rabbit populations are down. This year especially, as little shooting was allowed, we now have thousands of hungry pheasants wandering around. The road below our home every few yards is a pheasant road kill. My brother is licenced to night shoot, shooting foxes and bags foxes for DERFRA each year, which they test for disease one being rabies. He says the fox population is abundant, even with seemingly more shooting of them.
Dairy farmers tend to be very tolerant of foxes around here, as they are good at cleaning up after cows have given birth and they kill pheasants that are a pest coming round silage clamps shitting everywhere and coming into yards during the winter months and flying up squawking stirring up stock. A shoot near one of the farms I milk for releases 30'000 birds in one lot.
The worst threat on sheep I see over the years are Rooks, Jackdaws, Crows and Magpies. Sheep lambing or stuck on their backs are more likely to be attacked by them than a fox. They peck at their eyes and back ends whilst alive and vulnerable while giving birth. I've saved a few sheep over the years out walking the dogs, from losing an eye or their life.
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