Yes, they are handsome creatures. There is one of them on top of the 10-foot wall as our friend goes off to work in the morning, debonair, innocent-looking. And how lightly they step across your lawn, forelegs lifted as elegantly as trotting ponies or those schooled horses from Vienna (Lipizzaners, is it?). And brazen, some will say, who have suffered loss from the same. For there is a woman in south Dublin whose picture of the fox is simply that of a ruthless raider who twice at least got into her henhouse and killed every bird - except for the bantams who could fly up into the trees. To say it again - twice a fox or foxes slaughtered every one of her two dozen or so hens and left a trail of mangled bodies from the henhouse up the garden on the way back to the lair or whatever.
Even today, six years or more after, foxes still patrol this house. Not the same ones, because a fox's life is, from expert reckoning, not more than four or five years, but their descendants perhaps. The other morning the lady of the house, having a quiet cup of coffee, looked out the window to see one slowly and observantly circling around the house - in which, by the way, were two dogs. No haste on the fox's part. A confirmation to her that she was wise to give up the hens - otherwise, with obviously a big fox population in the area, she would always be worried. They are a fact of life in south Dublin, even in as far as Harold's Cross, where an active young gardener, - excellent fruit, vegetables and flowers - buried some over-ripe fish as compost. Foxes obviously have great noses, so next morning he found a hole where he had deposited his over-ripe fish - the ubiquitous fox. And not more than a hundred yards from there, his sister saw a handsome face nosing around the glass cat-hole in her dining-room door. No, he couldn't get in.
With their young being born about this time of year, they are on the lookout more than ever. Any food put out for the friendly badgers, who are still sluggish enough at this time of year, is likely, if they are not punctual, to be spotted or rather scented by the same red devil. There is another, and sentimental view. In The Countryman Wild Life Book, published years ago in the Pan Series, a woman tells of efforts to set up a relationship with a vixen. After studying the animals for seven years she had "found them to be charming creatures and by no means the rogues others would have us think them." Tell that to the woman who lost her hens to them. Y