Mammals
Fox
Vulpini · also called foxes
A fox is a dog that decided to go it alone. Where a wolf hunts large prey in a coordinated pack, a fox is a lightweight generalist that hunts small prey by itself, with a cat-like stalk and pounce, and eats fruit and beetles and rubbish when meat is scarce. That flexibility is why the red fox now lives almost everywhere people do, city centres included.
Overview
Foxes are the small members of the dog family Canidae, grouped loosely as the Vulpini, about 12 species worldwide. All are lightly built, with a pointed muzzle, large ears, and a long bushy tail, and all are omnivores and mostly solitary hunters. They live on every continent except Antarctica, from the Sahara to the Arctic tundra.
A dog that hunts like a cat
Foxes stalk close and kill small prey with a high pounce, coming down forepaws-first — the red fox using a near-vertical leap onto rodents it hears under snow. Studies suggest these pounces succeed far more often when aimed near magnetic north, hinting at a magnetic range-finder, though this is still debated. Foxes don’t form packs, but a pair often shares its territory with grown daughters that help raise the cubs.
Extremes of the family
The fennec fox of the Sahara has heat-shedding ears and needs no free water; the Arctic fox grows the warmest fur of any mammal and turns white for winter, surviving below minus 50 degrees C. And a famous Russian experiment breeding silver foxes purely for tameness produced dog-like animals in a few dozen generations, a model for how wolves became dogs.
Living with people
The red fox has the largest natural range of any wild carnivore and has taken to cities across Britain, Europe, North America, and Australia, living at high density on food waste and rodents with no predators and little hunting.
Status
Foxes as a group are Not Evaluated. Widespread species like the red fox are abundant and expanding — and, in Australia, a damaging introduced predator. But Darwin’s fox of Chile is Endangered with a few hundred left, and several others are locally reduced by fur hunting and habitat loss.
Fox: common questions
Are foxes dogs or cats?
Foxes are members of the dog family, Canidae, along with wolves, jackals, coyotes, and domestic dogs, and are not cats at all. But foxes have converged on several cat-like features because they hunt like cats rather than like pack-hunting wolves. They stalk small prey and kill it with a pounce, many have vertical-slit pupils that help judge distance in dim light and cope with bright glare, some have partly retractable or protected claws, and several climb trees. So a fox is genetically and evolutionarily a dog, but ecologically it occupies a niche much closer to that of a small wild cat.
Why have foxes done so well in cities?
The red fox is a generalist that needs no specific habitat, eats almost anything, breeds quickly, and is small enough to den under sheds, in railway embankments, and in overgrown corners. A city offers abundant food from bins, compost, discarded takeaways, deliberate feeding, and the rodents and pigeons that people also support, along with plenty of shelter and, crucially, no larger predators and little hunting. Urban foxes live at higher densities and in smaller territories than rural ones, and while they are bolder around people, they are still wild animals that generally avoid direct contact. Many cities in Britain, mainland Europe, North America, and Australia now have established fox populations.
Do foxes really use the Earth's magnetic field to hunt?
There is intriguing but not conclusive evidence. Researchers watching red foxes hunt rodents hidden under snow recorded the direction of each pounce and whether it succeeded, and found that jumps aimed close to magnetic north or south were far more likely to catch prey than jumps in other directions. The proposed explanation is that the fox has a fixed sense of the angle at which the magnetic field enters the ground and uses the point where its view of the sound source lines up with that angle as a consistent distance marker, letting it judge how far to jump at unseen prey. The idea remains debated and has been hard to test further.
Are foxes dangerous to people or pets?
To adults, essentially not; foxes are wary and small, weighing only 3 to 7 kilograms, and unprovoked attacks on people are extremely rare and usually involve a cornered or sick animal. Bites to sleeping infants have occurred a handful of times and are the main reason not to encourage foxes close to a house. To pets, the risk is modest. Foxes can kill poultry, rabbits, and guinea pigs left unprotected, and very small cats or kittens in rare cases, but adult cats and dogs are generally ignored or avoided. Rabies is a concern where it is present in wildlife, though many regions, including Britain, are rabies-free.