Renard The Ripper

OMG! Have you heard the news? Foxes, are, like, getting their own back and hunting us! Yes, if you read the tabloids, you will now 'know' that urban foxes have deliberately left the countryside with the sole purpose of murdering our children. No-one can sleep safe in their beds with all these scarlet-furred slashers on the loose!

I am, of course, referring to the ridiculously hyped-up furore over the horrible and tragic injuries a fox caused female twin babies in London at the weekend. Before anyone gets their knickers in a twist, I am not for one second suggesting that that is funny or anything other than appalling. My heart goes out to the poor girls and their families. What I am going to rip the shit out of is the tabloid attitude to the event, which is to whip itself into a nonsensical frenzy over 'evil' foxes.

Nonsensical, because everyone knows that foxes are evil - Foxy Bingo sponsors the Jeremy Kyle show, for fuck's sake! Every time that annoying Northern Chancer fox character does one of his little catchphrases before and after ad breaks, a hell mouth opens incrementally wider beneath Doncaster. And after he has sponsored the breakdown of civilisation as we know it and possibly helped quicken the coming of the Apocalypse, the jive-walking bastard relaxes with a spot of murder. He has a weighty duffle bag fashioned from the same lurid velour as his pimp suit, filled with grotesque and terrifying instruments, both medical and home-made, that he uses on his victims in ways more grotesque and sickening than anything Saw, Hostel or any other torture porn flicks could ever come up with.

Not.

What most people don't know is that foxes are wimps. They are pathetic. I used to be a hunt sab and the very reason cunters, sorry, hunters chose foxes and deer is that both species have great stamina but will panic and brick it when chased. A fox could easily take on a few dogs, or at least try to, but they just cower and freeze. Several years ago, when living with The Ex, he had an annoying habit of going outside for a fag just before bed and forgetting to lock the back door (despite my nagging). One winter morning I had to wake up earlier than him and as soon as my alarm went off and I realised I was mindbogglingly cold, I also realised that the back door must be open. As I made my way, shivering, downstairs and opened the door to the kitchen, I noticed two things - one, that everything in the kitchen was covered in frost and two, that the back door was wide open and there was a fox staring straight at me, its front paws just over the doorstep. Whilst my mind was forming the thought 'Aaaargh,I'mgoingtobemauledbyafox', the fox made a strangulated sound that was clearly the vulpine version of 'FUUUUUUUUCK!'. Never taking its eyes from mine, it slowly backed away, removing each paw from my kitchen with slow and deliberate movements - the same movements we all make when trying to appear casual when backing away from a loony at the late night bus shelter - and then turned and absolutely pegged it, crashing into the fence and then crazily jumping onto the shed to make its escape, all the while making sounds that I did not need to be Johnny Morris to know meant 'oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit'. Frozen human shortarse in novelty Xmas pyjamas 1: supposedly killer vermin 0.

They say foxes go into a frenzy in a chicken coop, but this is just emotive language - a hungry animal getting food for its family is going to do more than give a single prey a nasty bite and also, foxes are so easily freaked-out that all the squawking and flapping and flying about probably panics them into attacking everything in sight out of a sense of misplaced self-defence. They're like the terrified first time teenage burglar of the animal world in this respect. I hate the dark side of anthropomorphism; that when animals kill or attack, they are doing it due to 'evil' intent; that they are cold-hearted, cold-blooded killers, that they are specifically targeting us for some twisted reason. Leaving aside the obvious point about the destructiveness of humanity, this is not only embarrassingly kiddy-level illogic, it just serves to threaten a further sense of isolation and disconnect between humans and the natural world. Carnivorous and omnivorous animals kill to survive; there is no intentional cruelty involved. Well, apart from cats, but let's leave them out of things for now (I don't want to make them mad). We forget that humans too are omnivorous creatures that eat other creatures to live; we've just found sophisticated ways of both killing and alienating ourselves from the reality of doing so.  Ways, that if other animals had our level of understanding and morality, would truly appal them. Well, again, apart from cats (more on the madness of cats later).

We also forget that humans too are animals made of tasty meat. In the main, considering we're so much smaller and/or feebler than so many other meat-eating animals, as a race we get off pretty bloody lightly in the being-eaten-or-attacked stakes. The subtext of the Killer Foxes hysteria is that the fox was trying to eat those poor babies. I don't believe this for a second, but the sad fact is that it does not make it 'evil' if it was. No-one has stated that the injuries were even caused by the fox biting them, although it's entirely reasonable to presume that if might bite if freaked out - after all, foxes belong to the dog family and we all know how unpredictably nervous dogs can act, especially around babies and children; this does not make it 'evil'.

There is one very important thing that all these wildly speculating hacks have overlooked in their clamour to exploit a family's suffering: that a fox's call sounds eerily like a crying baby. Okay, to be precise, it sounds like a nightmarish synth version of a possessed crying baby in a mid-80s shlock horror, but it still sounds like a baby crying - the first time I heard one, in my teens, I woke my parents up in a panic because I thought one of the neighbours must be doing something terrible to one of their infants. It is entirely reasonable to imagine that the fox found the house open and heard what it thought was the cry of another fox - maybe even the cries of some cubs - and went to investiagate. It's entirely reasonable to imagine that the fox couldn't see what it thought it would and, alerted by noise, jumped in the cot to investigate. Just that, or the fox scrabbling to get out could cause horrendous claw injuries on human flash. I am not trying to lessen the devastation the family must feel or gloss over the reality of the horrible injuries suffered. One of the twins most likely faces a childhood, if not lifetime, of corrective plastic surgery procedures. I just find the callous way the tabloids have jumped on this unheard-of occurrence to create The Next Big Scare that preys on the minds of parents the only 'evil' thing about it all.

Above all, the silliest thing about the whole Evil Murdering Foxes horseshit is that the tabloids are getting everyone so worked up over a freak event so freakish that until a few days ago, none of us had ever heard of a fox attacking a human, much less thought of them as any sort of threat to us and ours. Animal experts have been rushing to explain that they just don't know of instances where foxes attack people and when foxes do gain accidental entry to houses, they tend to act like dogs; curling up to sleep on beds, chewing rugs and shoes, opening cupboards and eating accessible food, etc. Certain animals are called vermin and depicted as 'bad' or 'evil' purely because they aren't any use to humans ie for food, as beasts of burden, as pets, etc. This seems to especially be the lot of foxes and I worry that far too many people forget or do no want to expect that animals are actually, um, allowed to be animals regardless of the needs and interests and lives of human animals. This doesn't stop me being heartbroken when an animal maims or kills humans, but it does stop me feeling the need to look like an idiot by screaming about culling whatever species has offended us most recently. Pet cats are responsible for the deaths of a few babies a year, as they are prone to sitting across their faces and suffocating them (anyone who owns, or has ever owned, a cat will know they love to lie over your throat at night as your breath is so warm), but no-one suggests that mankind is under threat from cats (AKA Moggy Murderers, Feline Fiends). Even though all you have to do is be stroking them and they can go from purring in ecstasy to trying to screechingly rip your face off in 0.00001 seconds for absolutely no discernible reason. Which we find adorable!

I guess the point of this blog, apart from defending foxes, which get a pretty bum deal, publicity-wise, and hoping that this doesn't somehow create a resurgence of support for fox hunting from ignorant fucktards, is to release a strangulated cry of exasperation over the ridiculous lengths that the gutter press will go to to scaremonger and create sensation from absolutely anything. Portraying utterly bizarre events that they blow out of all proportion in their 'reporting' just adds another tiny layer of worry, panic and dissatisfaction with the modern world in the minds of those too gullible and kneejerk to see through the nonsense they're being spoonfed and benefits no-one apart from Moloch, sorry, Murdoch. The tabloids have managed to create yet another reason why the people they make unnecessarily scared of their own lives feel the need to cling to the every spurious, hateful word of the very people that make them so unhappy, like a whipped dog lovingly licking the hand of its master. Or a fox thanking a hunt master for the exercise.

I'll let the last words on this go to my wise friend Hannah W: "We like cuddly foxes in the country but we don't want them in towns, thank you. We don't want to ban fox hunting but we're perfectly happy to lay traps and put down poison to get those urban foxes who try to murder our children. Or we'd like to maybe bring back fox hunting, because look what's happened - we ban it and this is how they repay our kindness! We want to continue dropping litter in the streets and scattering fast food at midnight but we don't want any nasty predators taking advantage of it. We want our wildlife to look pretty for Springwatch but don't want it near us".

Amen.

By E.


PS Nuffink for 5 weeks then two in one day! Blogs, I mean, hur hur. Stayed tuned for more schizo blog posting, folks!