Those of you who know about my feelings towards all animals may appreciate my horror and distress at yesterday finding a dead fox-cub in our small front garden beside a wheelie bin. How it died I don't know. It was only about eight inches long in body with its brush-tail a further four inches. It was under some foliage and I only found it because two of my cats were outside, both acting rather oddly and restlessly. I doubt if my own or any other cats would have been responsible for its sad demise. I couldn't bear to look at its face mainly because it may have had its eyes open. It was clearly not breathing, and as I swept it up with a hand-brush into a dust pan, grimacing all the while, there was no movement in its stiff little body. Although I couldn't look at it closely, from what I did see there were no obvious injuries. Perhaps it had starved. Nearly tipping over into tears, I double-wrapped its little body and gently placed it in the bin. What else could one do?There's a skulk of urban foxes (I've only just found out the correct word via google) living in the park on the other side of this road. I sometimes see adult ones foraging for food from the roadside bins when I get up in the early hours to let my pussies out front. Any other cats also out at the time are, unsurprisingly, very wary of them, though the foxes themselves appear to take no interest in feline presences.
As for the poor dead one, I didn't know they would wander far out at such a young age, but somehow this poor chap did - and was fatally unlucky. Poor parents - especially for its mummy. Oh, so blisteringly sad!
What an awful thing to find.
ReplyDeleteThe experience hit me deep down, Mitch.
DeleteIt doesn't look like my comment made it through.
ReplyDeleteIt breaks my heart that this happens; even to a so-called wild, or feral, animal.
Absolutely, Bob. 'Painful' is much too mild a word.
DeleteIt's so upsetting, isn't it, to find a creature like that? I'm glad someone else thinks of the animal's parents! I think that whenever I see a poor fawn hit on the road...
ReplyDeleteAnimal parents must find it especially perplexing when their offspring inexplicably just disappears - or even dies in the parents' presence. I'd like to think that they get over it and move on quicker than we humans do, even though we (usually) know the reason why their loved one died. But of course we can't know it for sure. Still unbearably tragic though.
DeleteI too get all blubbery seeing a dead animal. Even though I know Death happens it still hurts.
ReplyDeleteI'm with you there. It's not exactly 'worse' than experiencing a human death (how could it be?), it's just 'different' - and brings about a totally 'other' kind of pain. I so dislike hearing people downplay the latter on the grounds that there's a fair comparison between them. There is not!
DeleteRay, How sad! Poor thing did probably starve. We have foxes here in southern Delaware too. Some of them are so scrawny. I wouldn't mind if one of them took a rabbit or two from my property.
ReplyDeleteRon
The several foxes which I have seen here over the years - or maybe it's been just one or two of the same one - look reasonably well fed, though how they get food out of wheelie bins with lids, I don't know, though one does occasionally see such bins tipped over and rubbish strewn all over the kerb but not that often.
DeleteI don't like the thought of their killing a rabbit or any other animal but of course for them it's a natural matter of survival.
However their demise, no matter how it happens, is still tragic.