MP calls for urban foxes to be treated as vermin.

urban fox (credit: Steve Punter)

It was so sad to see on Environment Questions in the House of Commons yesterday the Tory MP Greg Hands call for the law to be changed so that urban foxes could be classed as vermin. The new classification would make it much easier for urban foxes to be culled. Fortunately his call for a change in the law was rejected by Environment Minister Jim Paice.

Urban foxes should be treated as vermin.

The question that Mr Hands MP put in the House was; “Last summer a number of my constituents were attacked in their own homes by urban foxes

“Could you liaise with the Communities Secretary (Eric Pickles) to see if we could change the law so that urban foxes could be treated as vermin in the same way as rats and mice are?”

Had Mr Hands MP received a more positive response to his question then that would have been a real concern over our attitudes to urban wildlife. We really need to be able to live with wildlife in our environment. As we expand into wildlife’s natural territories then the animals have to change their lifestyle to meet changing food sources and habitats – the least we can do is to accept them into our environment.

Other people happily live with really dangerous creatures.

Let’s face it these are urban foxes we are talking about – not the most dangerous creatures in the world. Yes some people have been attacked but those occurrences are extremely rare and can easily be tackled by some very simple preventative measures or actions that can be taken to discourage foxes from getting to close to vulnerable humans.

These are urban foxes, it’s not like in Churchill where you get the annual invasion of dangerous polar bears, neither are they lions and cheetahs that many African villages have to deal with. We are not talking of tigers that kill people in Indonesian or other Asian villages. We need to get this into perspective. If towns and villages can learn to live with really dangerous and killer animals in their locality, then surely the Brits can learn to live with urban foxes roaming their streets.

Problem foxes can and should be dealt with but to undertake a blanket cull of foxes in the urban environment would be wrong and pointless. It would also be a shame. Urban wildlife can really bring a lot of pleasure to people. For a lot of animals the cities and towns offers a last bastion for their survival and many species flourish in towns that don’t in the rural landscape.

Urban wildlife gives people access to nature.

I remember when I used to live in Wolverhampton – and the Black Country doesn’t come much more urbanised. I used to spend hours watching the water voles in the canals, we had a couple of local foxes that used to come out each night, a couple of miles down the road on a disused factory site a badger family had made a home. The local gardens would be full of bird song each morning as a wide diversity of song birds arrived to feed on the wealth of berries and seed and food put out for them by people.

I now live in a rural town and can not remember when I last saw a water vole – there’s certainly none in the local river or canal. I have not seen a foxes for ages, neither have I seen a badger for a while. The bird life is just a fraction of what it was in Wolverhampton, both in numbers and species diversity.

It would be sad to see urban wildlife turned into a pest and mass culls undertaken. It will not be a good legacy for future generations if we leave the urban environment as devoid of wildlife as great swathes of the rural environment. It would be an awful situation if our urban parks and gardens becomes as dull as an agricultural field because we start to consider one species after another as a pest and kill them off.

We can learn to live with foxes.

There’s communities across the world that have learnt to live with dangerous wildlife be that lions, wolves, bears, crocodiles… a whole range of species that can be dangerous. People learn to adapt, they learn how to discourage conflicts without the need for mass culling. If there is a problem animal then that animal is dealt with on an individual basis. There’s no reason at all why British people can not do the same with foxes.

It’s just so sad that there are those who think it is neccessary to even raise the question in the House of Commons about needing to reclassify urban foxes as pests.