FT263

The media’s latest folk devil, it seems, is a member of the animal kingdom. The newspapers are currently full of stories about the threat posed by urban foxes after a freak incident in Hackney, east London, saw a pair of babies (Lola and Isabella Koupparis, aged nine months) mauled by a fox while asleep in their cots. Their mother described the incident as “a living nightmare”, while other residents worried that they might be next. One local, health trainer Michael Para, believed that “Something should be done about them… They’ve terrorised our garden.” (D.Telegraph, 7 June 2010). As we went to press, fearing for Mr Para’s petunias, a blurry police photo of the ‘suspect’ was doing the rounds; it showed a young cub “alert and staring at the officer through the glass of the sliding door” ([PA] 9 June 2010). It was uncertain whether this was the same animal that had subsequently been trapped and killed.

As usual, experts provided opposing views. Pest controll­ers (no vested interested there, then) talked of the increasing dangers posed by an “out of control” fox population, calling loudly for councils to fund a cull and warning of the “disease risk” the animals represented. They were speaking of toxo­plasmosis, a para­sitic disease for which the main host is, of course, the domestic cat (see FT203:16; 219:56–57). And as for attacks by animals on humans, these – as one wildlife officer pointed out – are almost exclus­ively down to ‘man’s best friend’, the pet dog (5,221 hospital admissions in 2008-9), not foxes, which, no matter how bold they may appear, tend to avoid us.

Meanwhile, the Kentish seaside town of Whitstable was being stalked by another fox of such unlikely size and aggressive disposition that it had earned the kind of soubriquet more usually reserved for ABCs – ‘The Beast of the Bubble’ (the Bubble being an affectionate local name for the town). The ‘Beast’ first made the local headlines when it reportedly attacked a pet dog whose owner had to fight the monster off with a garden chair. And the Beast has been up to its tricks again it seems; the latest Whitstable Times headline was “Super Gran fights off giant fox with shovel”. (This is Kent, 2 June 2010)