In 2020, I thought a lot about foxes

Published on 22 December 2020

In 2020, I thought a lot about my relationship with animals: what has influenced it, how it’s shifted.

At the start of the year, as part of my masters degree, I did a module in animal studies. Part of it was about human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism – the idea that humans are fundamentally different to all other animals and that we are the most important entity on earth (or in the entire universe, some say).

Since then, my relationship with foxes has changed.

Foxes are grand. But I didn’t always think so.

I arrived in London ten years ago. Shortly before, there was an incident with a fox and a child left unattended. I don’t remember the particulars, but I do remember the tabloids and newspapers stirring a panic: “Savaged by a fox.”

My political awareness was non-existent and I had absolutely no idea of where each of the UK media institutions sat on the sensationalist scale. The Sun and The Mail were papers my family read and quoted from but at this point I did not know they were to be avoided at all costs.

Anyway, my introduction to the urban fox was fear. I know I carried this around for a while because I have distinct memories of that fear when walking down an alley behind uni in 2012 and running in Springfield Park in 2015.

Over that time I became increasingly politically aware and engaged, and started thinking critically about the discourse in the media – mainstream or otherwise. But despite this, I’d never applied it to my fears of foxes.

Until I did.

One week during my masters, the assigned reading was a chapter from Being a Beast by Charles Foster. Foster wanted to really know what it was like to be “a wild thing”(1). In the book he details his experience when he “headed to the woods with his son – eating worms, navigating by smell and sleeping in a sett.” (2)

The fox chapter is absolutely magical and rich and weird and wonderful. Foster so clearly loves foxes.

“Foxes seem to enjoy being outrageous. They flaunt their thriving in conditions that are objectively wretched. … They are true citizens of the world.”

“Foxes are relational, empathic creatures.”

Like many people, I had never thought of foxes like this and through his words, I began to see them in a completely different way.

“The foxes showed me a London that was old and deep enough to live in and be kind about. They negotiated an uneasy peace between me and the East End, and indeed between me and other squalid, wretched, broken human places. It was a great gift.”

The way I felt when I read Foster’s words reminded me of something unrelated I’d read recently: “The feeling of a fiction collapsing inside you” (3). What a feeling! As I sat in class, reading the chapter, I felt that fiction collapse in real time. It was an enormous paradigm shift.

I went for a walk that night, looking for foxes.

Interrogating my relationship with animals has changed the way I think about many other things as well. Most of us don’t realise how many of our views of the world are shaped by animals, despite often not having them in our consciousness. So much ecological devastation is a consequence of our belief that we are somehow better than animals, or different to them. Nature is viewed as a resource which can be used at will to satisfy human interests. Even environmental and conservationist views that humans are the guardians of the ecosystem can be problematic because they place the human outside of – or separate from – nature, licensing all kinds of destruction.

Foxes remind me how prevailing beliefs in human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism have wrought such damage on this earth. They remind me how urgent it is that we (Western, modern, human animals) radically change the way we think about – and relate to – animals.

Foxes, in a way, have helped me to rethink what it means to be human.

(1) Being a Beast, Charles Foster, pg xiii,
(2) ‘A worm fell into my mouth. I gagged’: my life as a badger – The Guardian
(3) The Topeka School, Ben Lerner