Fox

Foxes are nearly ubiquitous throughout the world, living in widely different habitats from forest to desert to the Arctic.

What is surprising, though, is that scientists admit that very little is actually known about the lives and habits of foxes.

The reason, which this book explores in depth, is that foxes are almost universally despised as being wicked.

From the time of Aristotle, naturalists have succumbed to the general bias against foxes, either openly asserting that foxes are barely worthy of consideration or worrying about the health threat posed by them.

While this low regard is understandable, since foxes steal chickens and have a strong odour, they are also strikingly beautiful animals possessed of a startling intelligence.

Throughout Europe and Asia, folktales and myths have built up around the fox depicting it variously as unrepentant thief and seducer, shapeshifter and deceiver, as an outlaw whose primary purpose is to disrupt human social order.

The fear and loathing people feel (paradoxically mixed with fascination) toward foxes are reflected in the many fox-terms that have entered different languages.In Japan, for example, where stories of the fox's seductions have developed into a complex mythic system, various plants are identified with fox-names to indicate how they are supposedly used by foxes in an alternate universe.

The contradictory attitudes toward foxes are exemplified in America and Europe by their classification as vermin at the same time they were being preserved and propagated by foxhunters and fur trappers, and depicted as loveable furry creatures in the movies.