This is a good rule of thumb for any wild animal:
When I read about people who get bitten or attacked because some bear, or “big cat,” or other furry creature “looked friendly,” I just want to slap them. But then I rarely have to because Mother Nature has already given them a hard lesson.
My mother got cat scratch fever from trying to help a feral cat. She had to take IV antibiotics for six weeks. It was a hard lesson to learn. “I don’t know how the hell we ever lived through that,” she says today.
I’ve seen them in daylight; but I’ve never seen one that showed any signs of approaching me, and if one did I’d also suspect rabies.
But what I came here to say was:
it’s a fox without mange!
[runs away rapidly from other snopes survivors]
I am always impressed by the amount of Doper knowledge - there’s always somebody who can share their knowledge.
I’m glad I’m not the only one that remembers this. 
You flatter me. I used Wikipedia. I love foxes but I don’t know that much about them.
'Splain please.
Man, I’m jealous! That’s a native bucket list mammal for me.
Where there is one, there is very likely more than one. However that shouldn’t disturb you much. Gray foxes aren’t coyotes - they usually aren’t a potential threat to domestic pets unless said pet is both small and incapacitated somehow. Your average healthy cat can back down a fox and may outweigh one. Rabies certainly is an issue (as it is in other urban wildlife like raccoons and striped skunks), but it is highly patchy in distribution and where it is enzootic. Otherwise they are handy to have around to pick off rodents and strew the unsecured contents of your garbage cans around (everyone loves that, right? 
).
Just be wary of any aggressive ones, which can be a rabies warning. Gray foxes (foxes and most urban wildlife generally) can get somewhat habituated to people to the point that they won’t flee on contact and they can be curious. But a healthy one will still keep usually keep a little distance between you and it and will retreat if approached.
Not sure if this is what they meant, but I know many people get pictures of a fox or coyote with mange and the animal looks so weird they think it is a cryptid.
The also have a couple of Gray (Grey for you Canadians) foxes:
That whole SAVEAFOX Youtube channel is a rabbithole foxhole you can really get lost in if you like cute animal videos.
There was a catch phrase on the snopes boards that went “It’s a fox with mange!” Started, I think, with some thread about a photo claimed by somebody online to be some sort of cryptid; and one of the suggestions about what it actually was, was that it was a fox with mange. (They can get mange, and it can make them look pretty strange.) The phrase got picked up and dropped into all sorts of threads about ‘what is this in the photo?’
Thanks. 
I like to pretend I’m keeping up.
I’m so used to not catching references that I couldn’t miss the chance to use that one!
Those of us in the oddballs’ corner need to help each other out.
It got dropped in so many photo ID threads that it sometimes was hard to have it taken seriously when the animal really was a fox with mange. And those photos and videos were submitted regularly, because they can indeed looked really strange. Even moreso when the image is taken from an odd angle, out of focus, and while the animal is running away…
I thought of posting a picture of one here, but the pictures just made me sad, and then I saw pictures of bears with mange, which are just as sad, and even weirder looking. 