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In village pubs beneath the Berwyn hills there are dark mutterings about the mysterious English couple who keep foxes at their cottage.

What are they doing with them? Are they breeding them? Worse still, are they releasing foxes into lamb-filled farm fields?

Richard Bowler rolls his eyes and sighs. He’s heard the whispers. “I’d never dream of releasing our foxes back into the wild,” he said.

“They wouldn’t survive very long."

Richard and partner Helen are among a handful of people in Britain who look after foxes at home. They are not their pets, he insists. Rather, they are the foxes’ “carers”.

Keeping Rosie, Hetty and Charlie is a full-time job. “We’ve not had a holiday since they arrived,” he said.

Richard, a wildlife photographer, sprang to prominence when Helen snapped a photo of Hetty on his back. It was duly syndicated, ironically making Helen the author of one of Richard’s best known works.

Originally a builder from Bedfordshire, he sought out the wilds of North Wales after the stress of caring for his terminally ill father.

As well as local odd jobs, and rent from a holiday cottage in Blaenau Ffestiniog, his photography pays the bills.

(Image: Richard Bowler)

Earlier this year BBC Winterwatch filmed from his garden and Richard is now a noted photographer of Wales’ polecats.

It was this passion that fuelled another: after photographing his first fox, he became obsessed with them. Each fox, he says, has its own personality.

While Rosie is haughtily aloof, Hetty is the prankster and young Charlie likes nothing more than a play fight with Maddy, the couple’s terrier.

Charlie is the most recent arrival, two years ago. “A lady in Hertfordshire found him on her patio,” said Richard.

“She contacted the local animal charities but they refused to take him. She found me through Facebook and asked if I would take him.

“By the time I got there, he was suffering from a lack of calcium and his back legs had gone – she’d been keeping him alive with cat food.”

(Image: Richard Bowler)

Hetty came when she was just five days-old, still deaf and blind. She’d been captive-bred. Over countless days and nights the couple bathed, massaged and hand-reared the cub.

“She was the size of a mole,” said Richard.

“She had a bad leg and foot, and we needed to hand-feed her every three hours: in the first 24 hours we only managed to give her 3ml of milk.”

For the first six months the new arrivals shared the couple’s living room – they quickly became inured to the smell.

When the foxes were old enough, they graduated to the patio before being introduced to their garden enclosures.

(Image: Richard Bowler)

Rosie, an orphan whose dad killed her litter-mates, has her own quarters. Hetty and Charlie share theirs.

“Rosie likes a more wild existence,” said Richard. “But when we call her, she’ll roll down the slope for a belly rub.”

All three foxes are happy to play with Maddy, a Lakeland Patterdale cross bred by hunting terriermen and brought to North Wales by Richard.

Yet for all their banter and play fighting, it’s clear who holds the upper hand.

“The foxes are much cleverer,” he said. “If Maddy is playing with her toy, they’ll watch on nonchalantly before darting in to snatch it off her.”

(Image: Richard Bowler)

Hunting critic

The household’s fox-dog interactions are the least of Richard's worries. In the sheep-dense countryside south of Corwen, there’s always the fear a local hunt will come tearing through.

As an increasingly vocal critic of fox hunting, Richard knows he can expect few favours in rural North Wales.

However his social media accounts have plenty of likes. In these he offers the view that hunting fulfils little purpose as foxes will quickly repopulate an area cleared by a hunt.

Neither is he convinced that foxes take lambs, though he is surrounded by plenty of farmers who will testify otherwise.

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Richard does have a left-field take on the debate – fuelled by his own practice of laying out roadkill for local wildlife in the woods behind his garden. If applied on farms, it could drive rural tourism, he believes.

“If sheep farmers were to gather roadkill and put it out on their fields, foxes would feed on this rather than seeking out sheep afterbirth or whatever,” he said.

“I know from personal experience that photographers will pay a lot of money to visit a site where foxes are known to gather. Some sites charge £150-a-day and are often full.

“You won’t get an influx of new foxes as those already there will hold their territory.”

(Image: Richard Bowler)

Despite luring wild foxes and polecats to his own property, in order to photograph them, Richard and Helen say they have lost just one of their chickens in six years.

Local pheasants are less fortunate: any that happen to land in the foxes’ enclosures don’t last very long.

(Image: Richard Bowler)

Do foxes make good pets?

Keeping a fox is legal but challenging and is not for the house proud.

As they are wild animals, the RSPCA does not condone it. They can carry disease and although they very rarely aggressive to humans, they may bite if scared.

You also have to know who’s the boss. Foxes, says Richard, are more like cats than dogs: they can be affectionate but only when they feel like it.

Save for the very committed, Richard would not recommend people keeping them.

“We occasionally squeeze a night away but only by feeding them before we go and returning first thing in the morning,” he said.

“If you go away you can ask a neighbour to look after your dogs, but you can’t do that with your foxes.”