An Endless Free-lunch Counter

Civilization has brought foxes a sort of epicurean unemployment insurance. Wounded game, carcasses left by poachers, carelessly-managed poultry farms, garbage dumps, and untidy picnic grounds provide an endless free-lunch counter; and racing highway traffic specializes in pre-masticated lunches. The down-bill furrow is another boon that keeps the fox from walking on his heels. Once the shade of dense virgin forests held food and prey to a minimum. Supporting evidence of this is shown by parallel conditions that exist today in remaining wilderness areas. But ultimately settlers cleared the land and plowed their furrows up and down the hills. When erosion, gurgling happily down these ill-conceived ditches, brought soil depletion, abandoned farms resulted. These stripped and forsaken acres fit the fox as though he were poured into them. Matted pastures with their fence-veins varicose with brush, rheumatic orchards, woodlots senile with shrub and briar, old hilltop fields remembered only by the wind—these are the places where the red fox likes to hang his hat.

However, all this only partially explains why the red fox has contrived to stay out of that color numerically. His personal construction is the pay-off—jet propulsion in fur pants, complete with radar and an automatic pilot. He can out-nose a tabloid columnist, out-listen a housewife on a party-line phone, out-see a sailor on leave, out-climb an aspirant to the social register, out-figure Baby Snooks and out-patience her father. A pair of foxes can run an ordinary dog to a frazzle without ever shifting out of second gear. One fox could do it, really, but it is not their nature to be selfish. Many a seventy-five-pound dog has earned tile right to stop at the first lamppost inside the Pearly Gates because he pursued a ten-pound fox too far out on the thin ice of winter, too near a cliff's glazed edge, or too close to a trap intended for his quarry.

Contrary to clamorous opinion, the fox's economic importance is not so entirely negative that the best that can he said of him is that worse things could be. To trappers he is a capital asset in fur-lined bonds amounting to scores of millions of dollars annually. He takes an enormous toll of numerous and destructive rodents, especially those animated meat factories, mice and rabbits. He is an irreplaceable buffer to the chase in regions where other game species are scarce. He is responsible for the development of the American foxhound. His contribution to the sportsman's menu has given foxhunters appetites second to none. He takes the blame for the sins of less spectacular characters in fur and feathers, and still trots along his buoyant way with tail afloat upon the philosophical current of his wisdom.

The fox is no third class moron; but neither can he stand up indefinitely to everything that man decides to throw at him.

By: davidbunch

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