The Hidden World Of The Fox, by Adele Brand

When one is a writer, there is little point in pointing out a mystery unless one is going to reveal it. To hint at mysteries that one does not wish to discover is only useful when one is writing a text that has very limited space and one wishes to hint at what one cannot say at this time but which one wishes to reveal at a future time if time and opportunity permits, but this is not the situation we are dealing with here, since the author has a whole book to reveal the mysterious and hidden life of foxes. The book, as one might expect, largely follows the author’s own knowledge of foxes, which means that while it includes some discussion of Arctic Foxes or the Russian silver foxes that are slowly being turned into tame foxes through selective breeding, the majority of this book focuses on the life of foxes in the United Kingdom, because that is where this author is based and knows the fox best. To say that this skews the content of the book is a massive understatement, although it is probably likely that the author has in mind a desire to write based on her own experience along with the assumption that her own experience of being a person interested in foxes in the UK is somehow representative of the nature of foxes around the world, where they exist in many countries. The author notes that foxes in the United States behave differently than those in the UK from her (probably limited) experience, so that means that this book does not quite live up to its title.

Does that mean this book is bad, though? Not exactly. This is by no means a bad book if you have any curiosity about foxes or any appreciation about the ways of wild animals who have been able to survive in human spaces. I must admit that while I am by no means someone who would be favorable to Green politics, I do have an appreciation for life of all forms, and foxes are certainly animals worthy of appreciation. The author notes the fact that they are extremely rarely dangerous to human beings, and have their own curious ways when it comes to governing their own society as well as ensuring they are able to stay safe and obtain the resources to survive. The author urges a responsible attitude that includes recognizing their wildness and seeking to understand them as they are and not as we would imagine them to be. This is all well and good, and the author notes that there is some division within the camp of ecologically-minded writers between people who wish to appeal to as broad as possible a group of people to enlist friends of the fox to help this species and to inform others about them while others seek more ideologically pure approaches to the environment. In seeking to appeal to a wider audience, I think the author does a decent job. It helps that in the fox she has an appealing subject.

This book, in terms of its contents, is a bit less than 200 pages, divided into eleven chapters. The book begins with a prologue that asks who the fox is. This is followed by a brief history of the fox (1), as well as an examination of where foxes live (2). The author then discusses what the fox looks like (3), how it raises its families (4), and the way it deals with neighbors, especially other animals but also people (5). The author talks about the sounds that foxes make, referencing the meme song (6) in the process, and also discusses the problems of counting foxes (7) as well as dealing with fox diseases (8). The author then discusses what it means for people to deal with predatory animals in our midst, something that people tend to be uneasy about (9). The author discusses what happens when fur flies (10) as well as the way that foxes are not suitable animals for taming (11), before discussing the fame that foxes have in an epilogue, and finishing the book with a fox watcher’s toolkit, acknowledgements, and a bibliography.