Jo Hudson's black cat Paddy was a ‘sweet, gentle animal,’ with distinctive white paws and a penchant for sitting on Jo’s lap on the sofa and following her to the kitchen as she cooked dinner. ‘She was always there,’ says Jo, 52.
Until one morning this April. Jo and her husband Nick were still in bed when a neighbour, new to the area, sent a worried message on the local WhatsApp group. Three foxes were in their garden – one carrying the body of a cat. Did anyone know whose it could be?
When the couple rushed downstairs to discover Paddy wasn’t by the kitchen door waiting to be fed, they feared the worst.
They were right. Their neighbours had taken Paddy to the vet. She was in the morgue by the time they arrived.
Jo couldn’t stand to see her mangled body. ‘It was a brutal way to die.’
She had seen her beloved pet late the previous evening. ‘Then the next morning she was being chewed up by a fox,’ she says. ‘It felt like the fox had killed her for fun.’
Of course, she knows she can’t prove this. Paddy could have died in any number of ways. But the vet told her this wasn’t the first time she had heard of foxes pouncing on pets.
Jo Hudson's cat Paddy was sweet and gentle and had a penchant for sitting on her lap on the sofa
‘Obviously as a vet she’s an animal lover, but she said foxes will go for domestic animals,’ says Jo, who, even before her traumatic loss, found the foxes that proliferated around her home in Kingston, Surrey, ‘a pain’. ‘If you tried to shoo them away, they were brazen. They would look you in the eye and wouldn’t budge’.
Never more so than now, perhaps, because late summer and early autumn is dispersal season, when fox cubs leave their families to set up territories of their own.
There are currently ‘something like 150,000 young cubs, the survivors of this year’s litters, trying to make their way in the world,’ says Trevor Williams, founder of the Fox Project charity. ‘They learn what’s okay and what’s not. Mistakes will be made.’
As Watford resident Carly Clarkson found out one night last week when a fox entered her home. Carly had dozed off while feeding her three-month-old daughter Josephine.
She woke to find a fox right by her face and she then noticed blood near her baby and what looked like bite marks on the child’s head.
‘It was absolutely horrifying,’ says Carly, 37. Josephine suffered puncture wounds and was taken to Watford General Hospital. ‘Imagine waking up and your child’s blood is next to you,’ she said. ‘I feel absolutely violated.’ Williams, whose charity rescues injured foxes as well as advising on humane ways to deter them, stresses this fox would simply have been curious.
‘I wouldn’t call it an attack,’ he says, because Josephine’s injuries are not ‘tear wounds. It’s obviously opened its mouth wide, brought the teeth down and is testing what it is’. Which might not make Carly feel much better.
Dramatic incidents like these are thankfully rare, but expose our fractious relationship with animals, whom many adore, but others, such as Boris Johnson, consider ‘a pest and a menace, particularly in our cities’. The former Prime Minister made the comment after an unnamed four-week-old baby boy was hospitalised with a hand injury when a fox entered his home in Lewisham, south east London, in 2013.
Carly Clarkson with her daughter Josephine. A fox sneaked into her home and bit the three-month-old's head
While cases of foxes attacking pets are rare and Williams stresses that ‘they’re terrified of cats and dogs’, in 2017 fitness instructor Marie Wilson recalled fighting off a fox after it jumped into her London garden and onto her Chihuahua.
Then in 2013 Richard Schofield was bitten on the wrist while trying to protect his cat Jessie from a fox that entered his Catford home and bit through her jaw. While it might feel as if you can’t look out of the window without seeing a russet coat at the moment, the fox population is actually 43,000 lower in 2026 than it was in 1996.
What changed is that modern farming techniques are wiping out their food supply in rural areas, and, like birds, foxes are becoming more established in towns and cities, where life is ‘easier’, says Williams. In London, for example, the fox population now comprises 14 per cent of the national fox population, compared to 12 per cent in 2000.
‘Urban and suburban populations are holding up relatively well, and that’s because food is easily available,’ says Williams. In truth, we only have ourselves to blame. ‘We’re not the tidiest of species. We leave food lying around. We throw it out of car windows.’
Williams doesn’t believe foxes are getting tamer, but that they are more relaxed on account of their proximity to humans. ‘They’re closer. They get your measure that much better. They’re more relaxed because they understand us.’ This summer’s drought has also ‘made life difficult in terms of finding small prey, such as bugs, beetles, and worms,’ he explains.
‘Water-wise, every wildlife organisation has been recommending people leave bowls of various sizes around their gardens to support every kind of species.’
Paul Davies and his partner Mili leave water for the fox cubs at the bottom of their north London garden. ‘They’re a nuisance,’ says Paul, whose two cats are ‘indifferent’ to the visitors. ‘But they’re also animals and we don’t want them to suffer.’
Daniela Sponder, 39, says local foxes ‘have caused so much hurt and damage. It’s left me heartbroken and angry’. The married office assistant from ‘the leafy part’ of south east London says her family has been in their semi-detached home for five years, during which time the foxes have ‘created the Channel Tunnel in our garden. The amount of holes they’ve dug is a nightmare’.
Trevor Williams, founder of the Fox Project charity, said the fox would have been 'testing' what Josephine was
She has resorted to keeping their food waste caddy inside another larger bin to prevent ‘easy access’. Last week she heard a banging outside overnight and looking out of her window saw a fox dragging her neighbour’s bin across the ground.
‘They dragged the top off, ripped through the bag, and left rubbish all over the floor.
‘Then they leave faeces over your driveway. It’s vile.’
What has devastated Daniela is not the damage, however, but the loss of her pets. One morning, in August 2024, she came downstairs to discover Wilfred, one of the family’s two guinea pigs, who lived in the garden, missing.
There were scratch marks on the door of their hutch. ‘The fox tore through the wire mesh,’ she recalls. ‘As soon as they can smell a pet, they’ll try anything.’ Cyril, Wilfred’s brother, was sitting in the corner, shaking.
She moved him indoors, but he ‘became a recluse, he was so fearful. It was awful. They were like our children, the amount of love they gave’.
Williams points out that rodents, like rabbits and birds, are foxes’ natural prey. As are chickens, four of which Daniela acquired in 2024.
‘We thought if we build a strong enough enclosure we stand a better chance. But unfortunately we didn’t.’ Foxes ate three out of her four chickens. She was first alerted by the silence one morning in spring 2024, and says: ‘Normally you can hear them clucking. As I approached their run, I saw blood all over the grass. The fox had dug underneath and ripped through one section of the run.’
Paul Davies says the foxes around his house are a 'nuisance'. Pictured, a fox on his armchair
All that remained were ‘bones and feathers, scattered all over the grass. It was horrific. I cried. I was shaken. That has scarred me for life’.
Daniela told her children, aged six and four, there’d be an ‘accident’ with a ‘naughty fox’.
She says: ‘They were devastated.’ She lies awake now, listening to the foxes’ ‘distinctive cry’, the lemon juice and chilli flakes she scatters – that she has read will deter them – having no effect. ‘It made me so angry that they will terrorise or destroy people’s pets,’ she says. She won’t be getting any more. ‘I can’t go through that heartbreak again.’
Others go to greater lengths to deter foxes. Last December it was reported that millionaire businessman David Walsh had installed an electric fence around his reported £44.5million Notting Hill mansion because, he told the Mail, his wife was ‘very, very scared of foxes’.
While many of Walsh’s neighbours agreed foxes were a ‘massive problem’ in the exclusive area, the RSPCA warned ‘electric fencing is not a humane or effective method for deterring foxes from entering a garden. It poses a risk to all animals, including cats, wild mammals and birds’.
Because foxes are not classified as vermin councils have no legal obligation to deter them. And as wildlife, it is illegal to harm them.
Besides, the Fox Project stresses, destroying foxes is not only cruel, but ineffective. Fox populations are self-regulating and if you remove one fox, another will take over the territory within weeks.
However, the charity says repellents from garden centres and hardware stores can help deter foxes from an area by masking the smell of other animals. Not being able detect scent makes foxes nervous.
Jo Francis, who had the handbrake and wheel sensors of her Range Rover chewed by a fox
For Jo Francis, a single mother of two, any such action would be too late. In October 2021 a fox chewed through the handbrake and wheel sensors located underneath her Range Rover. ‘It looked like the cables had been cut. My first thought was that “someone has tried to murder me”. I was horrified,’ says Jo, 52, who owns a digital marketing business.
It was dark when she got into her car on the drive of her detached home in the village of Barming, Kent, to go to the gym at 5.45am, only to discover it wouldn’t move.
Eventually she spotted wires hanging down from underneath, so obviously severed that the only explanation right then seemed to be that it had been an act of sabotage.
‘Your mind instantly goes to who might have done this – you go through your exes. I don’t get on that well with my neighbours. Then you think about kids... But we live in a really nice area. It’s not the Bronx.’
She reported the incident to the police, then called a mechanic, who, in addition to the cables, found ‘a massive fox poo’ under her car. ‘It’s foxes,’ he told her. ‘He’d heard of foxes wreaking similar damage on other cars,’ says Jo.
Sure enough, when she researched online, she found ‘modern vehicle wire uses soy-based insulation, which is attractive to foxes because of the smell’.
For all her shock, perhaps she shouldn’t have been surprised. Her village, with a wood at one end and orchard the other, has long been frequented by the animals.
‘We have a lot of people who are old and bored and seem to do things like feed foxes,’ she says. ‘As a result they are always jumping over fences and into people’s gardens.’
In her local Facebook group, a fox body found on the road is a polarising issue. Someone else will write ‘RIP Foxy’ and someone ‘Good, bloody vermin,’ she says.
There are also constant reports of missing shoes, with foxes suspected. ‘There’s always stuff from people’s gardens going missing.’
It took a fortnight for Jo’s Range Rover to be repaired. ‘I was a good £1,500 down,’ she says.
She has another car now, more ‘concealed’ underneath, ‘so I hope it won’t happen again’.
Like many, she wishes foxes no harm, but would rather they were kept at a distance.
‘They’re perfectly okay in the wild, but I don’t want fox mess all over the garden.’