Fuck me, a fox just walked in my back door & attacked my cat!!

[10psInaLooRoll]

I leapt up & screamed at it & it ran off. My poor cat is SO stressed with these bloody foxes & is pulling his fur out. We never used to have this problem, now it seems we can't get rid of them. They shit all over the patio & leave a terrible smell. Last week they ate my neighbours rabbit & left the remains in my garden. They dig holes all over the lawn & flowerbeds & they're up all night fighting/shagging like banshees. I've had enough.

Completely irrelevant... but why does female urine not have the same effects ....🤔

@Leobynature lower testosterone

Your poor cat probably needs an antibiotic jab.

Having big dogs in the garden does deter foxes. A friend who keeps hens swears by having her massive fuckoff wolf of an Alaskan Malamute outside. I have three dogs and we get very little obvious fox action, despite being in the middle of the countryside.

Foxes aren't as dangerous as they're made out to be, usually. Rabbits are their natural prey and should be in an above-ground house at night.

Jeremy is that you?

I've noticed squirrels & magpies getting bolder lately too.... they are plotting against us

A crow followed me walking down the road once, I wanted to shoo it but heard about that man who accidentally killed one and was hounded by crows for years.

Foxes aren't as dangerous as they're made out to be, usually.

Really? They are capable of killing human babies. In the news a few years ago, one got into a bedroom and attacked a baby asleep in a cot.

Banning hunting and encouraging them by feeding has not helped. We used to get a huge dog fox jump over the wall and take chicks from our farmyard. Also crows which were so clever as are all corvids. We used to do crow watch taking it in turns to sit outside all day. They would watch us. Eventually they always won.

As for the hunt being cruel, they never killed any foxes in our area, they just scared the shit out of them!

That is awful. I had a fox come indoors one summer when I left back door open, it ran when it saw me but there was never any discord between foxes and my cats.

I agree they leave poo around which isn't nice.

However I stopped feeding them. We have a common near us and there's plenty of wild life to sustain them. The reason I ceased to feed was because there had been reports of foxes becoming very bold and attacking people. My next door neighbour fed them for years, as I did, and one died at the bottom of their garden after which his wife said she'd had enough of them.

I'm very glad I stopped encouraging foxes and rarely see one now. A small one was in our garden the other day but when I went to the French doors (which were closed), and he/she saw me, they bolted down the garden and away.

I have to say I like foxes, they are very beautiful and the cubs are gorgeous but many of us who had urban foxes in their gardens almost forgot they are wild animals. If we had black bears or cougars wandering around, we wouldn't feed them!

get a terrier or a neuter your females and get a male or get a larger dog. It's not worthy of a problem to post about. "get pest control" there is always one pampered eejit on a thread. If you can't manage this, don't have pets.

Two of my neighbours have had dogs attached by foxes in the last 6 months.
One house had 3 dogs and the fox was seen carrying the tiny Yorkshire terrier in its mouth after my neighbour was alerted by the barking of her other two dogs, a husky and another largish dog. She got the Yorkshire terrier out of its jaw (Fox was cornered in the garden) and the fox then attacked the husky.
It was very scary. Fox then hid behind a shed and they made a catch pole and were able to capture it and released it in the wild.
A few months later two dogs were attacked by a fox in another garden. The noise from the fight was horrific. One of the dogs was badly injured and has now had a leg amputated, she is just a puppy. The fox was injured too and ran away. The fox was found dead 2/3 days later on the street nearby.
We are all worried as many neighbours have young children and/or dogs.
Please don't think a dog will deter them as it clearly doesn't. I'll pass the word around about the male urine.

@TheSmallClangerWhistlesAgain you can’t compare urban and rural foxes. Rural foxes rarely stray onto property in the same way urban foxes do. Urban foxes are developing no fear at all of people, they are out at all times of day and night and aren’t deterred by dogs, noise etc in the same way as rural foxes.
Humans are encouraging the population of urban foxes to thrive in an alien habitat, rural foxes exist as part of the ecosystem, they have no need usually to interact with people for survival.
We rarely get fox issues out in the sticks, I keep hens though and on the odd occasion we’ve had foxes on the property we get the guns out, but its not often.

Urban foxes are a problem because humans encourage them to be so. We need to take lessons from bear management in the USA/Canada and prevent access to garbage and stop people from feeding them

When I lived in London, foxes were commonplace but while I'm assured that they live in my Australian suburb, I've never seen one, and more interesting heard one, that piercing cry when they are courting.

However yesterday my NDN said she saw one shinning up a tea-tree and getting into my garden. I don't know how they manage here as all rubbish is in secure bins and I don't know anyone who sees them as anything but vermin to be got rid of.

That should be "or" not "and".

FUCKING FOXES!!! Guess how many times I was up last night? 6. It's like being woken by a newborn. Last night was exeptional in that there were 6 fights in my small urban garden. Because I sleep with the windows open the racket was extra loud. I got up to watch each time & now I know why my flowerbeds are so damaged every morning. The foxes are SO energetic, they charge around all over at 100mph. It was a parent fox & young fox. Thankfully, I thought to lock the cat-flap last night because they were trying over & over to get in. Makes me wonder if they've been coming in regularly at night? (my bedroom on the 3rd floor) I have heard the cat flap go when me & the cat are on my bed but I thought it was just the breeze. The handy thing is I did see one of their garden access points to I'm going to block that up today. I'm gonna make my garden like Fort Knox.
To the poster who suggested pest control, our council won't touch them. The only thing you are allowed to do is privately hire a marksman at your own expense.

They are capable of killing human babies. In the news a few years ago, one got into a bedroom and attacked a baby asleep in a cot.

This isn't true. Don't believe what you read in the Daily Mail. There have been 3 reported instances of foxes going into houses and 'attacking babies' and all 3 cases have been proven to be false. 2 were proven to be attacks by the family dog on the baby that the families tried to cover up by blaming a fox and the third is suspected to be the same but the investigators couldn't find enough evidence to be 100% certain (although by amazing coincidence, the family dog went missing shortly afterwards).

To the poster who suggested pest control, our council won't touch them. The only thing you are allowed to do is privately hire a marksman at your own expense.

Or you can use humane deterrence as per the link I gave earlier which I will now re-post:

foxproject.org.uk/deterrence/

For those who can't be bothered reading the link (including the OP it seems), in brief the advice is to go to a garden centre and buy some "Scoot" and/or "Get Off My Garden" as these have been proven to be the most effective at deterring foxes and they're safe for animals (i.e. the OP's cat).

Pest control won't work - even if you are an unpleasant enough person to "hire a marksman" - as by removing one fox, you've created a vacant territory and another fox will move into that within a few weeks. Especially at this time of year when cubs will soon start leaving their mothers and starting out on their own.

We had a cub in our garden last summer, scared the crap out of me when I went to hang out the washing! He wasn’t scared of me at all. Our garden is awkward to get into so he got stuck and had a snooze by the shed. I left him some water and our neighbour saw him drink when he woke up and then he found his way out. Then this spring was started finding loads of fox poo in the garden. I sprinkled out of date curry powder around the boundaries and it seems to have stopped them coming in.

Hope your cat is okay!

As for the fox coming in via your cat flap OP, that's entirely possible but if there's no other signs of entry in your kitchen, it's unlikely. Foxes are very curious and may have stuck their head partway through the cat flap but if they'd been inside, you've probably smell it and there would usually be signs of being inside (like things moved/knocked over etc).

(I work with foxes)

@HundredMilesAnHour.. thanks for correcting the thing I heard on the news about a fox attacking a baby in a cot. I honestly didn't realise it was actually the dog and they blamed a fox! Bloody Daily Mail!

Do you live near a zoo? Lion poo is amazing for keeping foxes away.

Actually scrap that. You buy pellets that have been soaked in lion dung. You can't buy the actual poo for bio security reasons. You can get the pellets online

Apparently they aren't keen on dogs either

Well, i have a dog and the foxes aren't bothered by him or deterred by him having urinated in the garden. They continually destroy the fences too so the garden isn't dog proof.