It’s January, the “month of unrest”, mating and shrieking season in the fox community, which is also causing unrest among Mavis’s neighbours. While the foxes are barking, urinating and defecating along the borders of their territory, and having noisy, wild and uninhibited sex, members of the neighbourhood association are busy sending bossy fox-related emails and enraging each other.

Mavis was outraged by an email instructing everyone to check their gardens for evidence of foxes, and reminding them that an untidy garden is the foxes’ absolute favourite place to be.

“Just ’cause she cuts her lawn with nail scissors,” snapped Mavis, and rang the fox preservation people, who advised her to block up some holes and redirect the foxes. Anyway, what else can poor Mavis do if she spots tell-tale signs of fox? Report them to the local stasi? Sadly, yes. We are that harsh. You can hire a fellow to come and shoot foxes, £350–450 a session, plus £50–£75 a corpse. He’s always especially busy and coining-it in town after Christmas, what with all those turkey carcasses and leftovers scattered about, and screaming fox noises keeping residents awake.

Why bother tidying up, keeping your bins covered properly, recycling waste efficiently and wearing earplugs at night for a couple of weeks, when you can get someone to briskly mass-murder the pesky foxes instead?

Luckily, my neighbours are generally rather keen on foxes. Why not? We’re not farming sheep or keeping chickens round here. And I haven’t heard a peep out of those foxes at night. We have our own local fox-rescuer, and instead of bossy emails, I get charming Facebook photos of our foxes lolling about on shed roofs or sauntering along the pavements, and in April, of the sweetie-pie cubs emerging.

Culling doesn’t work anyway. Another fox will just move in and fill the gap. But in spring 1994, sarcoptic mange hit foxes in Bristol (where foxes have been monitored long-term). Within two years, more than 95% had died, leaving a fox ghost-town. As Stephen Harris wrote in the New Scientist, no one was heard “celebrating their disappearance. Only mourning their loss.” Be careful of what you wish for.