Bob Hobden6/12/03 5:16
"Tom wrote in message
That's what foxes do. Kill your stock and that's why they need to be
controlled in some way. The only fox control for the moment is hunting.
If you have a fox at your livestock you sit up all night and shoot it.
My neighbour did just this and shot 3 in a week, all the hunt does is
distribute the foxes round the countryside.
If you don't want to do this yourself there are plenty of sports hunters
out
there who will do it for you for nothing.
True, but as it's difficult, to say the least, to get a certificate for a
rifle for use in the open, I have a problem if someone tries to kill foxes
with a shotgun having come across one that had just died having been badly
wounded in the hind legs. It must have starved to death in agony over some
weeks.
I don't hunt, never have and I was very anti until I came to know people who
really do *know* the countryside and talked to them at length. I still
couldn't hunt but I do have a better understanding, now.
S0 - it is very difficult to get a clean shot at a fox, even if one has
permission to have a gun. Once shot, foxes go to ground and unlike dogs,
cannot lick wounds clean, so they die slowly and agonisingly from gangrene
or as said above, starvation.
Poisoning is hardly an option because not only is it a very slow, painful
death, how is one to be selective in its use over acres of wild or even
farmed, land? Foxes come into our garden - shall we poison the fox (if we
wanted to) or our dogs and the badgers that visit sometimes?
Last year, we picked up a badger which we think had been poisoned and then
hit by a car. We rang the RSPCA for help and after some garbled and
confusing exchange of info, I established that I was talking to a girl on a
London switchboard, asking me the "name of the street you're in". We were
in an un-named lane which is just one of the many rambling around here. She
suggested we 'pick it up and take it to a vet' - nul points for badger
knowledge, too. Using two other boxes, my husband managed to get the
badger into a crate and into the back of my Land Rover. That will show
anyone who knows anything about badgers, how very sick this one was. We
took it home, put it in a comfortable place in a shed, waited 60 minutes and
then my husband shot it. The poor brute was foaming at the mouth, had gone
blind and was in a terrible state of distress, barely breathing.
My fear is that this is what will happen to foxes in the future. No run,
chance to escape, get away, live to fight another day - just a horrible,
poisoned, gangrenous death.
I have no time for stopping earths, stag hunting, hare coursing but I do
have a better understanding of fox hunting, now.
(cross posting deleted)
--
Sacha
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