FOXES


LUV - Foxes! Little foxes! Widdul woxes! WUGGUH WUGSWUSH!

How can you not love foxes? I love foxes. I love them so much that, when I was a teenager, I would regularly get driven around the countryside by crusties, and leap into the path of thundering horses carrying intolerable toffs hellbent on chasing a helpless fox across farmland, getting their dogs to corner it and rip it up and, finally, smear its blood across their intolerable toff faces.

And, being a bit of an intolerable toff myself, sometimes this would result in a lovely high tea. Divided loyalties, yannow.

But I digress. I love foxes so much that I risked death by horse. Here’s why:

1. Foxes are the underdog
They are literally the underdog. Foxes come way down the list in the canid family, after wolves, jackals and dogs. And yet they thrive wherever they choose to live, whether they’re stealing actual live chickens or raiding the bins behind Chicken Cottage and raising their cubs in my back garden. Foxes are scrappy little chancers, which makes me root for them.

2. Everyone loves a ginger
Right?

3. Associated words
The Latin name for the red fox is vulpes vulpes, which sort of sounds like a cartoon character drinking very fast. A male fox (did you know this?) is called a reynard. And a group of foxes is called a skulk. Which is plainly brilliant.

4. If a cat and a dog loved each other very much….
…. And it were biologically possible, their offspring would look like a fox. No, it would. It would. Shut up.

5. Stuart Heritage hates them
And, despite the litany of mithering and adventures in Pzizz and Observer-good-sleep-CD-stealing that he details below, he still hasn’t figured out that the answer to his fox-based misery is earplugs.

Ssh. No one tell him.
- Robyn Wilder


HAT - Readers, I am exhausted. I can’t sleep. It doesn’t matter what I do to combat my insomnia, whether it’s Pzizz or muscle relaxation exercises or listening to the Good Sleep CD that I nicked out of a copy of The Observer in a pub on Sunday. I simply can’t get enough sleep. Why? Is it stress? Anxiety? An over-reliance on bullshit new-age sleep gimmicks?


No. It’s foxes.


Specifically, it’s foxes having sex. God knows why, but my road has recently become some sort of sordid swinger pit for foxes. Which would be fine, except that fox sex is SO FUCKING NOISY. It sounds like a screaming woman watching a knife fight between two newborn babies. It’s unbearable. And they’re at it all the time - putting it in, taking it out again, then putting it in again just to spite me. And I don’t think it’s one pair of foxes, either. It sounds like a whole orgy of foxes. It sounds like a scene from Fox Caligula. When I left the house this morning I was half expecting to skid about on a thin layer of fox jizz like a baby deer on a frozen lake.


I’ve looked into this, and fox sex is apparently so noisy because of the bulbus glandis, an erectile tissue structure specific to canines that’s located at the base of a fox’s penis. The bulbus glandis swells up during intercourse and effectively locks the male fox together with his partner until he reaches the point of ejaculation regardless of how willing she is. However, that’s by the by. I don’t care why foxes have such noisy sex. I just want them to stop.


Seriously, if humans can evolve enough to have hushed, self-consciously polite sex with each other for fear of waking the neighbours, then foxes should jolly well learn as well. Foxes are supposed to be distinguished and aristocratic, like Basil Brush and Disney’s version of Robin Hood. It would be a shame to realise that they’ve actually been like heavily amplified versions of Ron Jeremy all along.


You might think at this point that I’m about to call for the reintroduction of fox hunting. The truth is I’m not. That’s unless the sound of a fox being ripped limb from limb by a pack of furious dogs is markedly quieter than the sound of one fox having it off with another fox. Because if it is, I’ll sign up for it right away. I don’t care about how cruel it is. Fox sex is just far too noisy.


And it’s impossible to masturbate to.


Sorry.
- Stuart Heritage