First steps in foxing

I am extremely lucky in that, being brought up on a farm, the countryside was always on my back doorstep. But that doesn’t mean I’ve been foxing, in the way we picture it now, all my life. In fact, back when I started out, most people didn’t do any fox control.

Foxes in those days were something the farmer or gamekeeper sorted out, or maybe you knew a chap from your rough shoot who was known as the vermin killer. They all got on with their jobs very quietly and, apart from when there was a hunt day coming up, could do what they wanted. For the most part, the rest of us didn’t know what was going on!

I mentioned the hunt, and that’s another reason fox control wasn’t done on an individual level. This was back in the pre-ban days, and they wanted their sport – so if you had a problem fox, more often than not you’d hand it over to the hunt. You didn’t really get involved at all – you told the huntsman you had a problem and left him to sort it out.

All in all, unless you dealt with cubs in the spring when foxes were harassing your lambs, you barely did anything that could be described as ‘foxing’. There wasn’t a fraction