If you’ve encountered more than few red foxes lately around your local urban area, you are not the only one. With approximately 10000 foxes supposedly living in London, which is the same as 0.11% of London’s population, you are more likely to see a foraging fox than not.

 

However, the most surprising thing is not that more urban foxes are being spotted despite their secretive, lone nature, but that these creatures are behaving more like furry friends than foes.

 

Residents from the South-Western London borough of Wimbledon have been particularly elated with their local foxes’ friendly behaviour. Local habitant, Michelle said “I woke up yesterday morning to find a baby fox perched outside the door of my flat, so I lifted it down the stairs and perched him happily in my local park. He was so cute and so far from any aggressive, wild beast. This isn’t the first time this has happened either; I am happy to help what are essentially communal pets.”

 

Michelle isn’t wrong to compare foxes to pets as studies have recently shown that urban red foxes are becoming more similar to domesticated dogs. A study team at the University of Glasgow’s institute of biodiversity, animal health and comparative medicine, gave evidence to support the idea that compared to their rural counterparts, urban, red foxes have evolved to have a much smaller brain size capacity and a different snout shape to forage for food in urban surroundings – namely public bins.

 

Therefore, next time you see an urban red fox wandering around your street or sniffing your bins, you don’t need to be afraid. In fact, you can treat the shaggy critter as more of a familiar, neighbourhood pet, as the Wimbledon residents are, rather than a wild untamed wolf, as that is what it has now grown to become.