The Hunt for the Golden Mole

by Richard Girling

  One of these, unsurprisingly, is the ubiquitous red fox, Vulpes vulpes, which has coexisted with humans since the Ice Age. Like no other, it has clung to life with a tenacity that invites all kinds of anthropomorphic projections – it is intelligent, resourceful, limitlessly adaptable, the possessor of unsurpassable beauty. Despite its modest size, the sight of one always quickens the pulse – especially in England, among whose much-reduced native fauna it reigns as undisputed top predator. It is important also because of what it represents in the eternal processes of negotiation between man and beast. It has the widest range of any land mammal on earth, right across the northern hemisphere from the Arctic Circle through North Africa and Central America to the Asiatic steppes, as familiar in Afghanistan, Mongolia and Bangladesh as it is throughout Europe. You would think that 10,000 years would have been enough for us to get used to each other. Yet no other animal, save perhaps the rat, has rubbed so abrasively against its neighbours. Its role in fiction is as old as story-telling – fifty-one of Aesop’s fables involve foxes, and children’s literature is full of their misdemeanours.

  So, too, are some of Britain’s more excitable newspapers. As foxes range ever deeper into towns and cities, so the stories darken – no longer the moral fables of Aesop, but cautionary tales scrawled in blood. There is fear in the streets. At one end of the emotional spectrum the fox is a lovable rogue, to be held in awe, welcomed into our wipe-clean, over-manicured lives as our closest contact with the truly wild. At the other, it is a sly, disease-ridden sadist. (Scarcely believable as I type this, a foxhunt trots jauntily past my office – example par excellence of our jangled attitudes.) I am reminded of the front page of England’s Sun newspaper from 24 July 1987, which reported that a prisoner at an Essex police station had ‘SNARLED and howled with his lips curled back, CROUCHED on all fours, FOAMED at the mouth and LEAPT at police with his hands and fingers rigid in the shape of claws’. Headline:

  WEREWOLF

  SEIZED

  IN SOUTHEND

  This is a classic of the ‘man bites dog’ genre, news simply because it’s so preposterous. In the same way, it is the very rarity of fox attacks on humans that ensures big headlines when they occur. As with murder, there is a perverse logic at work. Incidences are too few to translate into a calculable risk, but it is their very rarity that puts them in the news and creates the illusion of danger. A cornered fox may bite if it feels threatened – typically it will deliver a cautionary nip and back off – but it won’t go looking for trouble. If you examine a fox skull, you’ll find it’s small and delicate, with teeth that seem surprisingly insubstantial until you remember that they evolved to eat mice. Foxes are only slightly heavier than cats, and usually come off worse in fights. For this reason they tend to steer clear of them. The average home territory of an urban fox is half a square kilometre, which means that it overlaps with some 250 pet or feral cats. In Bristol, which until the mange epidemic of the 1990s had the highest density of foxes anywhere in the world, each fox on average is responsible for 0.17 cat-deaths per year – negligible when compared to the numbers ill-met by cars. Most foxes never kill one at all. Violent interactions with humans are exponentially rarer even than this – a handful a year, but with every drop of spilt blood making news. Compare this with dogs. Every day in the US, a thousand people need emergency treatment for dog bites. In England it’s more than five thousand a year, but it takes a dead child to turn one into a story. As I have discovered, there is no surer way of guaranteeing hate mail in Britain than to write something antagonistic about dogs, their breeders or owners; and no easier way to curry public favour than to write something prejudicial about foxes.

  In a way, this is the least of the ironies. Thanks to television, most people now can recognise many more animals than were known to our nineteenth-century forebears, for whom ‘nature’ was the visible hand of God. No one without top hat, frock coat and beard would have known an echidna from a pangolin, or a tenrec from a hedgehog, or been certain that a whale was not a fish. Now we are both more familiar with and more remote from our co-inhabitants of the planet. Wildlife has been put on the other side of a screen, odourless and with an orchestral backingtrack. It’s a glimpse, not an experience, an incidental contributor to the urban mindset that puts people and wildlife into a divided world of ours and theirs. The fox here stands for the whole of nature. We love it, but we don’t want to share our space with it. It is at once ubiquitous and alien, to be feared as well as loved. Every time a fox, rightly or wrongly, is blamed for some urban outrage, the cry goes up for a cull. The populist mayor of London, Boris Johnson, was at it again in early 2013 when a baby had its finger bitten off.

  No amount of science will slough off the ancient myths. Many people believe, and newspapers report as fact, that foxes hunt in packs. But they don’t. Why would they? A mouse is not a wildebeest. An animal evolved to hunt small rodents doesn’t need the help of others. A more recent myth, eighty years in the making, is that town foxes are somehow different from country ones – degenerates that have forgotten how to hunt, and which survive by raiding dustbins. We chuckle now at the great eighteenth-century clergyman–naturalist Gilbert White for taking seriously the idea that swallows spent the winter at the bottom of ponds. If White could revisit us now, he’d chuckle right back. Given harder currency by the electronic swirl of twenty-first-century media, our own myths are no less risible, and are harder to defend because we have the evidence that proves them wrong.

  The fact is that urban and rural foxes are exactly the same. All foxes are opportunistic omnivores that eat as they find. It is true that diets differ, but that’s what it means to be omnivorous. You could say the same of humans. A London fox typically will eat 24.1 per cent meat, bones or fat (including food left out for it, and scavenged pet food). This it will beef up with 14.4 per cent wild birds and 13.1 per cent small mammals. Earthworms (12.2 per cent) are more important than pet birds (5.8 per cent) and pet mammals (2.9 per cent) added together. Bristolian foxes eat more meat (32.6 per cent) than the Londoners, but a much lower proportion (0.9 per cent) of pet mammals. What none of them does is raid dustbins. Years ago, the Mammal Research Unit at Bristol University monitored more than 5,000 household bins and found that only 2.7 per cent of them were regularly disturbed by foxes. Even that turned out to be an exaggeration, as surveillance revealed that many of the visitors were not foxes at all but dogs and cats. Since then the old-fashioned dustbins have been replaced by wheelie bins inaccessible to anything smaller than a polar bear.

  After fear of attack comes dread of fox-borne disease – specifically sarcoptic mange, which is triggered by the same mite that causes scabies in humans. At least one British newspaper has linked it to the ‘rotten diet’ supposedly scavenged from garbage tips, and it is a spectre commonly raised by pest-control companies touting for business. Mange is a hazard for all foxes, town and country alike. In the late 1880s an epidemic so depleted the English counties that foxes had to be imported from Europe for the hunts (a fact not much mentioned by those who argue that hunting is all about pest control). The first modern case in Bristol was in 1994 and involved an animal that had spent the winter outside the city and brought it back in the spring. The resulting outbreak reduced the population by more than 95 per cent. But mange has nothing to do with garbage. The mite is passed on by contact with other foxes or dogs. The more rational fear is of the roundworm Toxocara canis, which can cause blindness and is spread by faeces. But even in areas heavily used by foxes, faeces are extremely difficult to find. Students involved in the Bristol study often could find none at all, even in heavily populated areas. Not so with the dog, whose promiscuous faecal gifts have been responsible for every known case of toxocariasis in humans. For the reasons already given, I hesitate to mention this in public.

  It is not just this that makes culling senseless. Overall, leaving aside the mange epidemic, Britain’s fox population has remained remarkably stable. Every year before breeding starts, the number of
adults stands at around 250,000. A year later it will be the same – 425,000 cubs will have been born, and 425,000 foxes died. The reason is that there is a finite number of territories, and this is why shooting is a waste of bullets. If you killed every one you saw, within three or four days it would be replaced by another – then another, and another for as long as you could afford the ammunition or had the energy to go on pulling the trigger. There are always itinerants looking for new or better territories. It’s the same in the country, where the economic case for fox control was seriously weakened in the last century by the industrialisation of egg and chicken production, which put most of the nation’s hens beyond reach. On agricultural land foxes could even be counted a blessing. It has been estimated that a single fox in its lifetime can save farmers between £150 and £900 in damage by rabbits.

  These are just some of the myths, misunderstandings and prejudices that attend a single common species living close to man – just one small peak in a mountain range of stupidity. We can smile at, or be disgusted by, the ignorance or unfeelingness of men who cut belt-loops in a living hippopotamus, hang an elephant or feed a panda on grass. But comparisons with the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may now look a little less weighted in our favour. The twenty-first century is a glasshouse from which stones should be cast only with the greatest caution.

  One inviting target for retrospective judgement is Frank Buck, the extravagant Texan who became a dominant figure in the wild animal trade after the Hagenbeck firm was crippled by the First World War. For all his self-promotion, however, Buck is a hard man to dislike. The world loves an adventurer, and it certainly loved Buck. In his youth he was an apprentice safe-cracker and bar-room brawler, but he grew up to become one of the great all-American heroes. He may be forgotten now, but in the 1930s his celebrity equalled the likes of Charles Lindbergh, Babe Ruth and Gene Tunney. His books, written in a hard-boiled style closer to Raymond Chandler than to Rudyard Kipling, were bestsellers, his filmed exploits were cinematic blockbusters. A powerfully built man with an Errol Flynn moustache, Buck looked as well as acted the part – exactly the kind of man you would expect to come out on top after a bare-handed struggle with a cobra. His bravery usually was calculated to stay just on the right side of recklessness, and he usefully introduced Americans to many exotic creatures they had never heard of or suspected.

  The Texan swashbuckler Frank Buck, who stocked America’s zoos and starred in the circus

  ‘Nothing delights me more,’ he wrote, ‘than to place under the nose of an eminent zoologist a bird or a beast or a snake he has never seen before . . .’ Trapping or buying to order, he kept American zoos and circuses stocked with man-eating tigers and other crowd-pleasing exhibits and performers. The most crowd-pleasing exhibit was usually himself – astride an elephant, he was a featured act in the Ringling Brothers’ travelling circus, and his books were fast-moving chronicles of derring-do.

  No zoo now can offer quite such tremors of excitement as the characters in Frank Buck’s many personal dramas. Provenance is unemotionally described in terms of captive-breeding programmes, which in every other sense – conservation of species, welfare of individuals – is a vast improvement over the bad old days of plundering the wild. But there is no hint of danger; nothing to pump the adrenalin. Captive-bred animals might resemble their wild counterparts in every physical particular, but they have been stripped of their mythology and of their exotic and dangerous glamour. Public interest is no longer pricked by adventurers’ yarns or by the imagined hot breath of yellow-eyed man-eaters.

  All the stimulus, and most of the gratification, is now delivered by the camera. Through modern miracles of information technology, we witness the pitiless battles for food, mates, territory, survival – fights between elephant seals so monstrously violent that they seem to shake the house; the daily carnage of the African plains; orcas reddening the sea. But it leaves a gap, an unfulfilled appetite for the thrill of man against beast. It is a peculiar corner of the human psyche that two thousand years ago was gratified by the Roman amphitheatre, and which is now served by exhibitionists on television leaping on to the backs of crocodiles. The most famous of these was the Australian Steve Irwin, whose ‘Crikey, he nearly got me!’, uttered at critical moments during his championship bouts with crocs, Komodo dragons and snakes, became a catchphrase among his multitude of fans. But Irwin himself had no illusions about what drew people to watch him. As he told ABC television: ‘Steve Irwin’s all pretty interesting on the telly or in the movie and that, but by crikey, it’s great when he gets bitten. Now and again I do get bitten. But I haven’t been killed. And it’s that, you know, that sense of morbidity that people do have. There’s no use sticking your head in the sand and going, “Oh, no, they’re only here because, you know, I talk well.” Nah, man, they wanna see me come unglued.’ Off-camera, at the Great Barrier Reef in September 2006, a stingray pierced his heart.

  Another who paid the ultimate penalty was the ex-heroin addict, film-maker and eco-activist Timothy Treadwell, subject of Werner Herzog’s film Grizzly Man, who for thirteen summers lived up close and dangerous with bears in Alaska. On 6 October 2003, his mutilated head, part of his spine, right forearm and hand were found near the wreckage of his camp, where the partial remains of his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, lay half buried under twigs and dirt. Some of the missing body parts were found inside a large male bear shot by park rangers; others may have been in a younger bear, also shot, which was itself eaten by other animals before it could be dissected. Like Irwin, Treadwell specialised in the kind of risk that even Frank Buck would have drawn back from.

  For most people leading orderly lives, contact with wild animals is rare and fleeting. Bird tables and nesting boxes are compensation for some. But we are always being encouraged to go further. Excited young television presenters lure animals ever closer into contact, diluting their wildness in a bath of nursery sentiment. Aaah! This is danger of an altogether different kind. Throughout history, from the meagre knowledge of animal life demonstrated by the scribes of the Old Testament (when, as Christopher Hitchens pointed out, God seemed to have had no idea that he had once invented dinosaurs), misunderstanding is a common thread in human interactions with other species. Disrupting an animal’s behaviour is always risky, and sentimentality is no substitute for respect. Many people (10 per cent of households in Bristol, for example) are so pleased to see foxes in their gardens that they put out food for them. The sensible ones scatter it at a distance from the house, then watch discreetly from a window. That is as far as kindness should go. Luring foxes to the house, trying to feed them by hand, is literally a confidence trick. To hand-feed a wild animal is to ensure confusion when it confronts a less welcoming neighbour. Many fox ‘attacks’ begin this way.

  Vulpes vulpes nevertheless is one of the world’s winners, always flexible enough to adapt to change. The sufferings of the snow leopard and black rhinoceros are more typical. Environmental deprivation can be surprisingly easy on the eye. Two years ago I stood on a high bluff overlooking a raw slab of sub-equatorial Africa in the rainy season. The vegetation was of the kind that, in the language of television, could only be called ‘lush’. Birds in a multiplicity of sizes and colours called and responded like a sonata for woodwind – oboe, flute, piccolo – while insects gnawed at my burning neck. Africa never lets you forget how vulnerable you are.

  Two-hundred-year-old sterculia trees testified to a primeval landscape in vibrant good health, Gaia absorbed in self-love, while rainclouds layered above the hills promised more of the same. The conical thatched roofs of village houses were a frail, distant archipelago in a trackless ocean of green – men, women and children subsumed by nature like termites. It looked utterly, unimproveably right.

  And yet it was wrong – completely, utterly wrong, the eye deceived, as it so often is, by beauty. I should have been looking at dense riverine forest, not at this inviting grassy plain. The huts should have been hidden away in clearings known
only to those who were born in them, and the sterculias lost among trees as tall as themselves. They were there only because it was taboo to harm them – the local people, who know them as Mudjerentjes, believed the rains would stop if they cut them down. The glorious panorama that filled our lenses simply should not have existed.

  This part of central Mozambique has had it harder than most. Sixteen years of civil war cost many thousands of lives. The wildlife – once a bankable asset in a thriving tourism industry – was killed to feed soldiers, and the forest was cut down for fuel to cook it on. What the fighters had begun, illegal logging gangs and charcoal burners had done their best to finish. You couldn’t blame people for taking what they could. Malnutrition is no great friend of wildlife conservation. Add rampant malaria, Aids and patchy medical care often rejected in favour of the chants and potions of witch doctors, and it was a miracle that average life expectancy reached as high as forty. For protein at this time of year the people had termites, ants and caterpillars. And yet there is another misperception into which your eye might lead you. The alienation of the landscape from its oldest inhabitants is not an event: it is a process.