After Attack on UK Babies, Foxes Seen as Red Menace

LONDON (June 8) -- The red fox has long divided public opinion in Britain. Many country dwellers view the animals as livestock-murdering vermin and enjoy hunting them down with packs of dogs. But a large section of the population has a deep respect for these canny critters -- who have learned to thrive in Britain's towns and cities -- as reflected by Roald Dahl's charming children's book, "Fantastic Mr. Fox."

However, following an attack by one of the animals on 9-month-old twins in east London this weekend, foxes have lost many of their fans. According to Pauline Koupparis, the children's mother, a fox crept through an open door and into their house on Sunday evening. Koupparis, who had been watching TV with her husband, rushed upstairs when she heard the girls crying in the nursery.

"I went into the room and I saw some blood in Isabella's cot. I thought she'd had a nosebleed," she told BBC radio. "I put on the light, I saw the fox and it wasn't even scared of me, it just looked me directly in the eye." The siblings were rushed to hospital, where Isabella received treatment for injuries to her arm, and her sister Lola for facial wounds. A fox caught near the family home today was destroyed, although it's not known if it was the same animal that attacked the sisters.

Although the incident was highly unusual -- fox attacks on humans are almost unknown in the U.K. -- some media commentators have declared that authorities must now launch an all-out war on this red menace. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Clive Aslet -- editor-at-large of the pro-hunting magazine Country Life -- claimed that the number of urban foxes has rocketed in recent years, making a cull urgently needed. Experts at the University of Bristol's Mammal Group disagree, saying that urban fox numbers are relatively stable at about 33,000. They argue that the foxes have simply become more visible and confident over the past decade, as the amount of tasty waste scraps left lying around city streets has increased.

Aslet went on to argue that animal control specialists wielding dart guns should be ordered to patrol "railway embankments" where foxes are known to lurk. He added that "Fantastic Mr. Fox" should also be banned in schools, as it gives children the wrong idea about these troublesome beasts.

The tabloid Daily Mail also berated "urban dwellers" who "adopt a soft-hearted attitude to these predators, who are foolishly seen as cute, cuddly and clever." It cited pest controllers who claimed that foxes had been known to gobble up "cats, gerbils [and] chinchillas."

Other animal experts, though, have called on the British public to get the recent, admittedly tragic, attack into perspective. In England alone, some 225,000 people a year receive medical treatment for dog bites. "But people aren't calling for all dogs in cities to be culled," John Bryant told AOL News. Bryant runs the British Humane Wildlife Deterrence Association, which removes foxes and other critters from homes and businesses without killing them.

"I've never heard of an attack like this before in my 40 years of working with foxes," says Bryant, who speculates that the attack on the girls was carried out by a confused 3- to 4-month-old cub. He thinks it might have been lured to the nursery by the smell of diapers, which urban foxes have learned to associate with food, as they're often found alongside edibles in household trash. "It was simply an unfortunate freak occurrence."

Bryant now worries that pest control companies are using the incident to whip up fears over urban fox numbers and win new business. He also suspects that foxhunting supporters like Aslet are trying to capitalize on the attack, which is useful fuel for their campaign to reverse Parliament's 2004 ban on hunting with hounds.

The fox expert says that if Brits really want their animal neighbors to leave town, they need to do one thing: clean up their dirty habits. "We throw food out in the streets and leave it lying around in unprotected black sacks," Bryant says. "Our waste disposal standards are so appalling, it's no wonder that we're surrounded by scavengers like foxes."