Fox Attack On Twin Girls

[saggyhairyarse]

I just read this on the 'Latest News' on BBC News but when I clicked on the headline there was no info.

I am shocked and hoping they are not seriously hurt.

Culling won't make any difference though. As soon as a fox territory becomes vacant, another fox takes it over. If you remove a lot of foxes there will be a temporary dip in population and then it will rise again to meet level of food available. Fox populations are naturally self-regulating;vixens breed more cubs in years when the population is low, breeding fewer in years when the population is high.

The way to go is to reduce the food available - rubbish management (expensive) and education.

My council instructs us to put food waste - even cooked food - in our green wheelie bin which is collected fortnightly. Whiffs a bit in summer. Not sure foxes can get at wheelie bins but I wouldn't be surprised.

Oh, and Ryoko is right, magpies are clever - scientific experiments have demonstrated this (although cannot remember the details).

but Zeph if (a very big if - as I said I believe the parents) the parents were somehow implicated in their dds' injuries and had made the story up to cover themselves, then it stands to reason that they'd claim they'd actually seen the fox.

All our food waste and non-food waste goes in wheelie bins too. Nappies are something to watch out for - foxes can smell the food , er, 'waste' in a soiled nappy and rip any plastic bin bag to bits to get at the nappies.

Which makes me wonder if that could have been what the fox smelt, in the girls' bedroom.

Did you hear the audio? She'd have to be a bloody good actress to be making it up.

Don't they compost food waste in most places now? I am surprised. We only went to weekly recycling collections in march so I assumed everywhere else has been doing it forever.

We only have the plastic, paper, tins and that recycling, everything else has to go in the bin (no garden so no compost).

Orm - my surprise was that they tell us to put cooked food waste in the green bin with garden waste, raw scraps (and cardboard). I'd always understood cooked food couldn't be composted. No idea what the council does with it. Horrid thought that all those recycled cardboard products have dh's old meat scraps in them!

Edam - our wheelie compostable bin can also be used for fresh and cooked meat, fish (ew) and poultry. I stick the meat in but fish is taking it a bit too far.

Apparently the composting process involves 'heat treating' presumably to sterilize it all before composting

Oh, OK. Like pasteurising milk?

P.S. Is it OK to wrap meat scraps in newspaper? Dh says yes, I'm not sure as newspaper goes in a separate box...

I would imagine foxes very capable of getting in wheelie bins.

off to the newsagent to track down a copy of my late employer's esteemed publication Guns & Ammo then. Will brief dh to sit up at night guarding the wheelie bin!

(Will warn him not to take out any passing dragons while he's there though - I'm sure they must be a protected species. Especially that one from Ivor the Engine who was in the male voice choir. )

Our (v long) council guidelines say wrapping in newspaper is OK. I also put pet bedding in which usually goes in newspaper. I find DH's cardboard beer boxes from Majestic Wine Warehouse very useful for chicken carcasses

When I filled my summer pots with 'organic, peat-free' compost last week I admit I did look at it very carefully as I wondered if it was originally domestic food waste. There were some random funny lumps in it ...

eek. Am a vegetarian, should I avoid compost and recycled cardboard? (Actually not desperately worried about it as long as no-one makes me eat it.)

Well my imagination was doing overtime I admit but I thought, if it goes to compost then maybe someone must be buying it ...?

Maybe there's a new market. Vegetarian Organic Compost. Could produce a vegan brand too

Recycling round here is useless. In our "recycling" bin (emptied fortnightly) we can put clean paper (not greasy our covered in food), cardboard, junk mail, tins and plastic (as long as its bottle shaped). There seem to be no local facilities for recycling any other form of plastic, even if it's recyclable. Glass is now collected in a separate box once a month. There are no facilities in the county for recycling Tetrapak cartons. Fortnightly garden waste collection is an additional payable service. We cannot put anything apart from green garden waste in the green sack (no vegetable peelings, etc). The only place we can put food waste is either in a private compost bin/wormery or in the refuse bin.

I do think that the long term solution to controlling the population of foxes, rats, etc in cities is by becoming cleaner in our habits and through education. But how do we reach a new status quo in an humane manner? A cull may be distasteful, but to me it would be a more humane solution than allowing a significant percentage of the current fox population to starve to death - which is what would happen otherwise. Without tackling the issue of food supply, though, I agree completely that a cull is an exercise in futility.

Our food waste goes in a brown box with a tight clip to seal it. Has to be in newspaper or biodegradable plastic liners. We have a small 'caddy' to keep in the kitchen which we empty into the brown bin. Waste is heated to kill germs then composted. I think it's a good idea. A fox would struggle to get the bin open. I struggle to get the bloody bin open at times!

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the option of contraception for foxes? I seem to recall that a contraceptive was mixed in feed given to pigeons to try and bring the population down, perhaps they could try the same for foxes?

pest to go - this is an advert isn't it?