Has anyone ever eaten a fox? When the subject of foxhunting comes up, someone is certain to quote Oscar Wilde's summing up of it as "the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable". Do we know for certain that someone has experienced and judged the flesh inedible or uninteresting or horrible? After all, there are parts of the world where dogs are eaten. Anyway, edible or not, foxes are fascinating creatures, and city-dwellers are seeing more and more of them. The other day a woman walking her dog along a suburban avenue wondered why the Dalmatian made a lurch towards the gate of every house they passed. Finally, as a small side-avenue came in sight, a fox boldly stepped out of one drive, with satchel-toting school-goers all around, with cars almost bumper to bumper alongside, and skipped down towards a field which bordered the Dodder.
On thinking over this, a man was reminded that, although he has spent good periods of his life in Meath, even living for long periods there and fishing devotedly for days on end, he has seen more foxes in Dublin in his life than in the greenery of Meath. And if city-dwellers hear a piercing, heart-rending squeal just about now, it is likely a fox, for this is the mating season. To come back to the "uneatable" aspect. Is it because of his diet of worms and beetles and other creepy-crawly things; and hedgehogs, according to one authority? And slugs and snails? But do not free-range hens and ducks eat the latter? And God knows what the battery hens are fed. And do we not know that a Young Irelander, in 1848, fleeing the country, was fed badger ham in Kerry? The badger diet would not be so widely different from that of the fox: well, give and take a bit of carrion here and there.
A remarkable aspect of the fox is an apparent inbred gift for family planning or, if you like, contraception. And if you try to wipe them out, they have the capacity to reproduce, to level up again. James Fairley, whose An Irish Beast Book is wonderfully informed about foxes, remarks that in Northern Ireland 290,000 bounties were paid out between two and three decades "with no noticeable benefit". He dissected 1,000 fox carcases. His chapter on the fox in this book is a masterpiece. All this is not a plea for us to eat fox; just wondering why we don't.
Y