I subscribe to Hourly Fox on Twitter. A great many photos are shot at nighttime in a big city that I’ve always identified as London.
The only pics I don’t like are of fennecs (they just look evil) and one or more women who dress up and pose with them. They’re wild animals, not props. Likewise not crazy about keeping them as pets, but I’m not as offended by them.
I came home from work one day at 3 pm to find a red fox sitting in our yard. I pulled into the garage and secured our dogs. When I went outside the fox stood up and began slowly stalking me.
I ran inside and found my shotgun. I took the fox to the department of agriculture and they found it was rabid.
So, it is correct to say it is a “foxxy fox”? 
New Jersey might not be known for its wildlife but we have red and grey fox here and I’ve seen both.
I suppose you meant you took the remaining fragments of the fox to the Department of Agriculture. 
Heh, actually I circled around the animal so I had a safe backdrop, then aimed my 16 gauge pump at his hind 1/4s. I did a good job preserving the skull/brain which is what the lab needs.
Every bit of this post is foreign to me as an urban dweller.
We occasionally see red foxes in NJ and it’s always a cool thing.
I wouldn’t think twice about the time of day of seeing the fox. I wouldn’t think to secure the dogs. It would be weird if I saw it stalking me. No shotgun to grab, and it wouldn’t occur to me to do so.
Finally, if I had dispatched a fox, I wouldn’t even imagine taking it to the department of agriculture (ewww… it’s probably covered in ticks! And do I just put it in a black trash bag?).
My worry would be that I would get there and they would tell me I had hunted fox outside of the official season (probably an arcane schedule that rivals the formula for calculating the date of Easter) and I would be jailed for twenty years.
Nope, I know nothing of rural life!
Urban or rural, if you see a mammal acting in a way that is very unusual, you should consider the possibility of rabies.
This!!!
I examined the animal (it was young, still had its deciduous canine teeth) and placed it in an empty feed sack, of course!
I’ve seen foxes a handful of times, typically at dusk, and then only a blur as it ran off.
No arguments here! It’s just something that is way off my radar.
Around here, I am more concerned about two-legged mammals acting in a way that is very unusual.
Having never seen an actual feed sack in my life, I have a silly image in my mind of an irate Depression-era woman giving you a piece of her mind about the waste–she wouldn’t be able to make a feed sack dress out of it!
(though I suspect the fancy feed sack fabrics went out of vogue in the 40’s)
Now we know what to get you this xmas.
I (the OP) am an urban dweller. I live within walking distance of a major downtown area.
Those animals are around. You just haven’t seen them. Yet. They know how to be invisible.
Only if it is on the run. Then, it would be Sweet.
The animal I had the hardest time identifying was a ringtail cat on my back porch. I originally thought immature raccoon, but figured it out the next day.
I have a nest camera in my garage, mainly to answer the question “did I shut the garage door?”, but one night a spider walked in front of the camera, casting a shadow from the camera’s infrared light. I have to say that was the creepiest animal my camera ever caught. It looked like the special effects from a 50’s horror movie.
I live in a Chicago suburb, and it is an unusual week that we don’t see at least 1 red fox.
Fox and coyotes thrive among people. Most people just don’t see them often.
That grey fox sure is pretty.
I’m an urban-dweller, too, and if I ever saw a fox or coyote that didn’t make an effort to run and/or hide when it saw me, I’d suspect rabies, too. I don’t have any firearms, but I’d definitely call animal control.
One reason I have a walking stick. Not the insect. It will buy one a little time, at least. One of my sticks has a metal heel made of about 6" of chrome-moly steel that I cut off the top of a bicycle fork, crammed onto the end, so that should slow most sub-cougar-sized animals down considerably.
In NJ it’s very common for fox to have rabies.
Thankfully the last one I witnessed was from the safety of my car. I’ll watch out for Jersey foxes from now on!