to beg you for your fox solutions

[WinterDeWinter]

We live in London in an area which seems to have a lot of foxes - they run around the streets quite happily during the day, and fox-shit/piss in the garden has always been a problem. I hate, really hate the smell.

We have a dog who goes nuts when she sees them in the garden at night and seems tense all evening, waiting for that to happen.

Recently one fox has started walking along our garden fence multiple times per night, right up to our big doors. It's like it's taunting us and her! It's pissing on everything, especially just outside the doors, and now that spring is coming opening them in the day lets the smell into the house.

Has ANYONE had any success with any kind of repellant?

I don't want to put curtains up (am quite uptight about the look of the room haha) but will probably have to bite the bullet

DH sprinkled his urine on the fence yesterday - fox did not GAF last night.

What an awful thread, having someone out to kill them, bring back hunting, terrible attitudes.
Humans have encroached on their habitat and we now see them as a nuisance.

Most of the deterrent methods work where foxes have a lot of freedom to choose where they go.

However cramped into tiny territories in urban areas, they do not have much choice, they do have to leave their dens and find food, and that is a stronger driver for crossing into your garden than almost any deterrent you can think of.

My solution in the past has been (inadvertently not pre-meditated!) having lurchers who will kill them and see off any fast enough not to meet their maker.

If they are under pressure from high population numbers, not much shy of murdering them some way will work, and any you do manage to off will be replaced by others. They are in an urban setting, little more than a larger, slower reproducing rat.

We had a fox pissing on our front door- that was vile.

The last thing we tried as citrus scent. Lemon, orange, grapefruit peel left where they regularly pee /shit. It worked for 'our' fox.

Good luck

I live by a forest (Zone 5). I have absolutely nothing useful to add. The foxes sunbathe on top of our summerhouse and are in the garden most days. I wasn't aware of deterents but doubt anything would ward our ones away.

Well obviously, if you see one, I agree it will be a fox. But everyone seems to just assume everything ‘bad’ that happens in a garden is due to foxes? I live rurally and badgers are more likely to damage my lawn.

Me and my dog are currently being stalked by a fox. He chases us down the road until we are home. Happened just now on our walk, third time this week. How do you stop this?!

A couple of years ago, we had a family of foxes under our garden office. We waited until the cubs were mobile then blocked off access. The foxes still occasionally come in to the garden but they don’t linger. Until the foxes, we’d had a family of hedgehogs which we’d built a whole run of boxes for, then the foxes got into it and ruined it.

The local people who feed foxes infuriate me. Foxes are wild animals and are perfectly capable of finding their own food, yet these fucking idiots think that they need to leave whole cooked chickens out otherwise the ‘poor foxes’ will starve.

I hate to say this, not but you're not an animal lover if you had foxes killed.

I'm sure you could have contacted a wildlife centre and maybe had them moved on by someone. Yes there are centres that look after foxes. There must have been options you had not even thought of. Try harder.

Do the local cats not see them off? In her younger days my cat would chase away any fox she saw, although she is afraid of dogs. I particularly remember the time she chased a fox which ran right through the garden gate - which was wooden, and shut. We hadn’t realised it had rotted badly at the bottom. It was like something out of a cartoon.

An extra issue is although we always have foxes in our garden there has recently been a very mangy poor fox. Yesterday he or she came up to our back door. Luckily the door was closed as my baby granddaughter was asleep in her buggy just inside..had the door been open it might have come in and fixed do occasionally bite children probably because they smell of milk and baby food.We then saw it lying on top of the new mud kitchen just built for the older grandchild to play with. Not sure how germy a mangy fox is! I tried to find a wildlife rescue number for the poor sick fox but no luck. We've never managed to stop the foxes around here but they are very bold.

We had a fox visiting (and pooing in) our garden over the winter. Fixed the hole in wire fence and put bricks in the hole where the wooden slat had fallen off the bottom of the fence the other side.... no more foxes. Try and block up any ways they might be getting into your garden and that should help.

Line of electric fencing around the top of your fence! That should keep them out!

A farmer with a shotgun... joking 😃.

They don’t kill for ‘sport’ (human beings are the only animals to do that). They kill all the chickens so they can cache them for later but they invariably get frightened off coming back to collect all the hens from their kill.

They are not coming from the countryside into the cities - they were already there when we built up around them and destroyed their habitat.

I love foxes - I’d be the neighbour feeding them!

You think a fox being chased until it’s too exhausted to run anymore and then torn apart by a pack of beagles wouldn’t be stressed?

Really?

I really wish people like you were finned for feeding them. You are doing far more harm than good by doing so.
They do not need your help to survive!!! 🤬

Sadly for you, people like me cannot be “finned” 😁

We had foxes constantly in our garden when we moved here last year. The first morning after we moved in, opened the curtains to see a fox asleep on the back lawn!

We had bigger ones and smaller ones running up to our back door and down the drive. Couldn’t leave the patio doors open, they chewed garden furniture and would shit daily by the bins in the driveway and on the lawn. It was horrible.

Stupid neighbours were feeding them as we soon found out. I think our previous owner of our house did too.

We tried everything we could possibly think of. Lines of chilli pepper all around the boundaries, daily emptied bottles of vinegar, DH peed in a milk jug and emptied it on the lawn every morning for about two weeks, citrus peel, sonar, lion poo. Bastard things would come back and laugh at us

DH’s workmate then told him to use WHITE pepper, so bought a load of small jars and sprinkled it everywhere thinking it wouldn’t work but it completely stopped! They still run around outside and you can hear them screeching but they’ve never come into the garden or down the drive since we put the first lot down.

We have plastic spikes on top of our fence - seems to deter them.

Rural foxes and urban foxes just cannot be compared - rural foxes haven't really got the time to be messing about, trashing stuff (ie, playing) and don't need to mark their territory so fiercely (and of course most of their territorial markings will go unnoticed by people).

Urban foxes have far less pressure to find food, but much more pressure to defend territory, living in much closer proximity to one another, so their behaviour is quite different.

Just as an example I saw today, an urban fox in broad daylight walking up to a person chatting with other people and biting him on the leg. Undoubtedly this fox expected to be fed, wasn't and so got the persons attention with a bite, person still didn't behave as expected so the fox moved away, stared at him and moved on. A wild rural fox is NEVER going to do that!

Myself and all my neighbours have cats - they don't deter the foxes

I have one cat in particular who I regularly see enjoying a game of chase with them - one fox one summer took a liking to calling for my cat at the front door and would sit there waiting for him 😂

They are so brazen - they are also always on next doors olds kids trampoline

I've heard about putting wind chimes up or something so might try that but honestly im just resigned to having them around - I have a neighbour who deliberately puts out food every night as he is an amateur local wildlife photographer so posts incessant local social media posts of them

It's complete nonsense that banning hunting lead to urban foxes in London.

Rural foxes and urban foxes are very different and there has even be talk of seperating them out as subspecies because they are so different. Studies show they exhibit different behaviour, eat different things and are built differently. In places like London it's likely that they could be hundreds of years apart from rural cousins. Even in fairly new urban areas and developments you're looking at foxes that are multiple generations of urban foxes (a city fox has an approx life span of 2 years, rural foxes can live into their teens)

From a cub you can identify if a fox is from rural lines or urban lines. Decent wildlife rescues won't release an urban fox in the country or a rural fox in the city because each will struggle in an enviroment they aren't adapted to.

I used to work within wildlife rescues and to be honest it's mostly a human made problem.

In any small block of houses you'll find a house where someone is actively training them like a dog to handfeed, come to the back door, come back each night for food etc and a next door neighbour who will shoot them if they do. It's impossible for them to navigate

It's so blooming risky for the foxes. Locally one family hangs out at a shop because people encourage it by buying sandwiches etc because they think its kind. It's a really unsafe place for that fox and hanging out there will kill it. its parents (or at least one parent and a grandparent) were hit by cars in the same car park it sits in and at least one of it's siblings was poisoned likely because it's such an easy target.
It's actively training a fox to engage in unsafe behaviours

@Mammajay
The Fox Project would help