A cull of lions, tigers and Peter Oborne?
Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 2010-06-11 16:46.Publicity-seeking rants like his are seated in pure ignorance.
He has correctly identified that urban foxes come from the nearby countryside, but omitted the fact that foxes they are territorial. If you kill a fox which controls one area, another will come in to replace her. Something the councils learned a long time ago, after their unsuccessful slaughter campaigns of old.
Look at it objectively. We kill tens of thousands of them, largely in the name of fun, every year (fox hunters actually encourage foxes populations and have imported them from the continent in years gone by). In this extremely rare incident, a young fox - undoubtedly tamed by neighbours who feed her - dared to follow its instincts to have a go at a couple of babies. To a fox, food is food. It's a wild animal. It hasn't been trained. Family dogs, by contrast, have been trained, yet they attack 2,500 children a year. 99.9% of foxes live happily in our towns without a problem. Let's keep our heads and not treat this rare incident as the rule.
If we cull the foxes because of this one highly rare incident, we must also cull all dogs. And whilst we're at it, let's cull the humans who encourage foxes to hang around houses for food! We've already succeeded in sanitising nearly all our wild animals from this once wild island. Now our idiot 'Environment Minister' has ordered a massive cull of our protected badgers, in support of greedy, industrial farmers. Foxes are one of our very last wild animals, tortured symbols of the wild place this once was. Whilst we're at it, perhaps we should cull all lions and tigers (we nearly have, of course). Also wild, also dangerous, and quite a bit more the man-eater me thinks.
The only intelligent solution is to accept that these are wild animals, accept that they are PART of the isle we live on, and train Londoners not to compromise their natural fear of humans by feeding them. An intelligent Mayor would be calling for a public-education initiative.
And let's shout down publicity-seeking journalists like Peter Oborne who do nothing but encourage a loutish and ignorant attitude to the natural world.