Foxes are even less imposing than your average dog. Oh, they're more feral, and their teeth are no joke. Still, they're quite small and squishy. And their natural sound is somewhere between a meow and a bleat.
They're not wolves, in other words. They're in the same general family, but worlds away. Somehow they've found a niche, though. Aside from being cute―which of course they are―they're well enough adapted to survive millennia upon millennia.
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Except when it comes to fox hunting - one of the more barbaric sports I've encountered despite its practitioners wearing fancy dress, riding magnificent horses and never mind the hounds and the beaters. We're talking some seriously anachronistic customs - as in feudal. It all began because foxes ate a few chickens.
Did you notice their fluffy tails? They're called brushes in the hunting trade and getting one and the ears at the end of a successful hunt makes for bragging rights at the Hunt Ball. It's all very upper class, don't you know. But the foxes are wily as well as cute and I think they must have had some representatives in Parliament because hunting real foxes has been outlawed in England.
Spanish bullfights aren't necessarily something I'd want to watch--regardless of the fact that Ernest Hemingway was a fan--but at least a one-ton bull with sharp horns stands a chance against a bullfighter with a sword. Teams of hunters on horseback armed with rifles are overkill for foxes the size of ottomans. Avoid the heartbreak and just guard the chickens better.
Grisly souvenirs, those. Anyway, it's good that the practice seems to be passing in England. Or at least at that large scale, it is. Britain has much better traditions, which hopefully it can keep.
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