Beware the Cunning Fox and His Grand Evolutionary Plans
Beware the cunning fox. According to evolutionary biologists, the rural red fox (Vulpes vulpes) has been steadily, stealthily begging her way into our home and hearth for nearly a century now. It wasn’t until this year, though, that I actually found one on my doorstep.
It was about 11 o’clock on a fine spring night when a crashing noise out front alerted me to the visitor. I was inside, with the curtains drawn, watching the 1989 Kevin Costner-starring film Field of Dreams, while my family slept upstairs. Have you seen the 1989 Kevin Costner-starring film Field of Dreams? It’s about Ray (Costner), an Iowa farmer, who staves off mid-life ennui, fear of mortality and unresolved feelings of guilt towards his dead father, by mowing down his profitable cornfield and building in its stead a baseball field for ghosts.
Everyone tells Ray he’s lost it; that he’ll go bankrupt, his wife will leave him and take the kid, but this man has an unshakable faith, summed up by the film’s most famous line: “If you build it, he will come.” Good film, that Field of Dreams. And maybe, too, there’s something of the doggedly optimistic, “If-you-build-it-he-will-come” attitude in the foxes’ plot to get in good with us humans?
It was right at that point in the film when the ghost of Archie “Moonlight” Graham (Burt Lancaster) is finally stepping up to bat, after wasting his life and sporting promise as a much-beloved small-town doctor, when I heard that crashing sound. I hit pause on Field of Dreams and opened the front door to a Patio of Nightmares: my window box, upturned and smashed; soil and geraniums strewn all over, and there, lying across my welcome mat, in a gruesome parody of inter-species friendship, was the bloody corpse of an adult fox. The sound of feral teen laughter floating off into the night air offered the only clue as to what had happened.
What now? Was my home being marked as a future target for young Satanists? Was this a warning to repent my urban ways and respect the awesome power of Mother Nature? After fly-tipping the remains in an undisclosed location (Sorry to Newham Council, but have you ever tried to dispose of a body before the school-run?), I settled instead on these two take-away truths: 1) Broken Britain needs to bring back the youth clubs, and 2) There are more foxes about than there used to be.
Scientists attribute this latter point to a process known as “self-domestication”. There isn’t total consensus on the cause, but one widespread theory suggests that as human cities have expanded and encroached on rural habitats, foxes have adapted by becoming more tame. Zoologists define “tameness” as an animal’s tolerance of humans in close proximity. Or, in the human species, a tolerance of other humans in close proximity, as evidenced by, say, choosing to stay at home of an evening and watch a Kevin Costner film, instead of going out on the prowl with the rest of your pack.
Foxes are likewise tiring of the nightlife. As with those adult children who move back in with their parents after a few years of paying sky-high London rents on gutter-low salaries, foxes are sick of living by their wits and fending for themselves. They want in on the cushy lifestyle of the pet dog or cat. The short game might be to bury Dixy Fried Chicken in your flower bed, but the long game is to snuggle up beside you in your marital bed.
Sadly not everyone is as alert to the foxes’ stratagems as I have now become. About 20 minutes up the North Circular, in my mum’s more gentrified London suburb, humans still have the upper hand in the vulpine-sapien power struggle and a certain complacency has set in. Would I look in on the house, my mum asked, while she was away on holiday? Sure. Would I water the plants and feed the cat? Of course. And would I also put some food out for the fox family that frequents her back garden, along with their mange medication from the vet? Absolutely not.
My principled stand, however heroic, is a lonely one. I’m yet to hear of any London households officially keeping a fox as a pet, but the foxes make regular, unopposed incursions and have long since won the air war of propaganda. Three of my children’s classmates are named “Fox” (“Fox” is to the little bourgeois boy babies of 2024 as “Jack” was in 1994); a local community mural has been unveiled, of a Disney-eyed fox staring wistfully at a butterfly; and everyone now knows the source of those once-mysterious strangled screams you hear at night. It’s not someone being murdered. Well, it might be. But it’s also the foxes’ obnoxiously loud mating call, a reminder that they’re having more sex than the rest of us.
Not for long, though. According to Dmitry Belyayev, the Soviet geneticist whose decades-long experiment studied domestication in a group of silver foxes, tameness is only the first stage in the process. Next comes the gradual occurrence of corresponding biological changes, such as “reduced sexual dimorphism” (becoming less sexually attractive), floppier ears and smaller jaws. A glance in the mirror reassures me my ears are as firm as ever and likewise my strong, virile jaw, but worryingly, another of Belyayev’s tell-tale signs, “fur depigmentation”, is evident in grey patches around my temples. Arguably, I’m also showing “unique coat colours and patterns”, having started to dress more like a CBeebies presenter, in primary-coloured jumpsuits and “fun” knitwear, ever since the birth of my first child.
Perhaps the smart move here is to stop fighting it and make peace, not only with the foxes’ domestication, but also with my own. I could do that. Or — hear me out — I could mow down my mum’s hollyhocks and convert her garden into a fox-sized baseball field in the hopes of attracting their ghosts to replay the 1919 World Series. People will think I’ve lost it, but then, didn’t they say the same thing about Kevin Costner?
Ellen E Jones is a writer and broadcaster and the author of Screen Deep: How film and TV can Solve Racism and Save the World, out now. This piece appears in the Autumn 2024 edition of Esquire, subscribe here
You Might Also Like
