Foxes are winners; foxes are survivors. I have a feeling that, if mankind laid waste the world and destroyed himself, the foxes would still be there, feeding on the rats that would also survive.

They do not just feed on chickens. They will eat almost anything, alive or dead: the contents of your dustbin just as willingly as your chickens or your pet cat or rats that live around the place. They will eat grain and, according to Aesop’s Fables, grapes. They can run as fast as most dogs. They are so much cleverer than dogs that it takes thirty dogs guided by several men to catch them. They can climb trees just as well as a cat and can swim, which a cat can only do with difficulty. They can live above the ground, they can live on roofs, or they can live in holes in the ground.

I do not think they particularly like the work of digging holes – they would rather make use of what the badgers, who are really dedicated diggers, have done, or what the rabbits, also good diggers, have done. Foxes generally take possession of other animals’ holes and enlarge them to use as their own homes.

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Foxes have been at war with men for a very long time. When I first remember, the war was more or less static. The countryside was controlled by landowners, who employed people to make sure that the foxes survived in the off season so that they could he hunted in the hunting season. The same landowners employed gamekeepers to preserve their pheasants. Unknown to their employers, the gamekeepers attempted to poison the foxes with strychnine and other killers. I do not think they were very successful and the foxes still survived.

In those days, say 1920, foxhunting was done by the landed gentry and larger farmers; the ladies, looking rather glamorous, riding side-saddle, in beautifully cut habits, top hats, and veils, the men looking somewhat boozed and bloated. Later on, the women started riding astride like men, took off their veils, and you saw that they were also somewhat bloated.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A pack of fox hounds in Caithness Scotland with their quarry. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

I was always a bit against hunting, not especially because of the cruelty it involved because there was so much worse cruelty going on, but principally because the people who did it were so damned arrogant. When I first started farmwork, it appeared that because I was working and they were on a horse, they expected me to acknowledge them and pull my forelock like some peasant. Indeed, I felt rather like a medieval peasant with a lot of knights and barons on horses riding over the land I was trying to cultivate, damaging the crops. If I had had a pike in my hand, I would have felt like sticking it up their bracket. I imagine this was the way a medieval peasant must have felt, too.

Gradually, the landowners, by taxation or incompetence, abandoned their land, at least in our district. They either went to live in London, if they had sufficient income, or emigrated to Kenya and places like that where there was “more staff available, my dear”. The hunting was then taken over by business people and so it survived until the war.

When the war was over and it all started up again, our hunt had a new master – a Mr Barratt, the man who made the Liquorice Allsorts. A hunting farmer neighbour, notwithstanding my known hostility to hunting people, came round to introduce Mr Barratt to me. At that time I was conducting warfare against foxes because I had free range chickens and the foxes had been attacking my chickens. They appeared to do it mostly for fun, not for food. Do not let animal lovers tell you foxes only kill chickens to eat; they kill a dozen and eat one because they enjoy the job. I have seen them do it.

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Anyway, the hunting farmer introduced me to Mr Barratt and Mr Barratt said he hoped I would be co-operative. I pointed out to him that, at that moment, I was conducting my own private war against the foxes with the use of gelignite anti-tank grenades, which were left over from my service in the Home Guard during the war, which I should not have had. (I hope after all these years nobody can prosecute me for it.) I described to the master of the hunt how I put these 3½ lb grenades down the foxes’ earths, wired them up, and blew them up electrically, and how humane I thought it was. Mr Barratt laughed and the hunting farmer looked absolutely aghast.

We had previously had in the family a wild fox which we had tamed. His name was Freddie and he was a most attractive character. He was really fond of human beings. If you lay down in his pen, he would come and play in your hair. He would comb through your hair, I suppose looking for parasites, and was obviously quite fascinated by it. He would never attempt to bite. When he got out, the method of catching him was to lie down and he could not resist coming to play in your hair, and you would then try to grab him.

But one day he got out into some free range chickens, some white leghorn pullets with which I was very pleased. White leghorns are a very active breed of poultry (they probably barely exist nowadays). They are light, quick, and active but, before my very eyes, Freddie had had the heads off half a dozen of them and was literally laughing over his shoulder at one while he did it. Then he seized just one of them and ran off into the wood. This is what makes me think that foxes take chickens as much for fun as for food. Of course I was furious. I do not carry a gun and so I could not shoot him. The problem arose as to how to catch Freddie.

A friendly local doctor gave us some chloroform and we placed this on one of the dead hens and trailed it around the wood where Freddie was known to be. After a long, long time, he came out, smelt it, smelt it again, got a bit dozy, and we grabbed him. He lived for some years afterwards in a pen. A wife named Vicky was acquired for him but they never bred. They were wonderfully attractive pets, apart from the awful unearthly noises and the ghastly smells in the mating seasons. But no cubs ever arrived.

In the post-war period, when the hunt had become entirely dominated by business people, Mr Barratt’s job was taken over by a very successful pork butcher, a nice man who bought pigs from us and apologised when his hounds over-ran our pig runs. Still I was hostile to them, but not in a very active way. Then one day, two of our children came in crying and saying a fox had just jumped into our moat with a lot of dogs after it, and it was frightened to death.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Buccleuch fox hounds near Kelso in the Scottish Borders, February 2002. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

Sure enough, we looked into the garden and the place was full of men on horses and hounds. My wife rushed to the door and, from her full five foot one inch, addressed the master of the foxhounds, the successful pork butcher: “Get your bloody dogs out of this garden at once.” I could see his mouth framing the words, “Hounds madam,” but seeing her determination, all the self-confidence which being on a horse and which his perfectly cut red coat and his top hat gave him, evaporated. He turned tail like a small boy and got his men to call hounds and horses out of our garden and out of our yard.

I went into the garden and a bedraggled looking fox was sitting on the other bank of our moat, shivering or shaking, or was it shaking with laughter?

Now, the sweet manufacturers and the pork butchers have been taken over by multinationals and no longer do they go out hunting. The control of the local pack in a semi-suburban area has returned to farmers. The people who run the multinationals are too busy fending off take-over bids to spend time hunting. I think perhaps their wives do and certainly some of their daughters do. In fact, apart from a few farmers, it has become a woman’s occupation. Even some of my own family have started to hunt, so I cannot any longer feel quite so hostile to it as there are much worse things going on in the world.

Meanwhile, my own private war with the foxes is over. You cannot keep chickens outside anymore. You cannot keep free range chickens because people who have developed systems of keeping chickens in cages have made it uneconomical to allow chickens to go free.

Huge companies now produce chickens on a large scale and they have destroyed the farmyard fowl and deprived the foxes of their fun but not of their diet. Myxomatosis has killed off the rabbits which the foxes used to eat, but that does not bother them either. They have turned their attention more and more to living in towns, to living on the contents of people’s dustbins, and to killing rats, of which they are very fond. According to the BBC, they live on the roofs of town houses as well as in holes in my wood. I do not doubt it for a minute.

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For some reason or other, I still allow people to shoot some of them at harvest time in the cornfields, but it is time I stopped because now I think they are far more effective in dealing with rats and mice than Rentokil or any other company which specialises in pest destruction. Everywhere I go on the farm, I see where the foxes have dug rats out of holes. They have plenty of time, they enjoy their work, and they enjoy eating rats. So I have nothing against them.

Now, our neighbouring farmer comes round before they go hunting, he tells me where they are going to go, he puts up fences at suitable places for them to jump, he repairs the fences if they break them, he thanks me, and it is altogether a great deal more civilised than it used to be. My family assure me they never, never catch any foxes – or practically never.

At the moment, the foxes are easily winning the war because less hands are turned against them, less game-keepers are about, less farmers are protecting their free range hens. So there are more foxes. The sheer number of foxes makes the job of the hunt more difficult in trying to catch them because, no sooner do the hounds get the scent of one fox than they cross the track of another, so frequently get diverted. Perhaps the foxes have worked out a relay system to tire the hounds out.

Tony Harman was a working farmer who, in his later years, became the author of the bestselling book and BBC television series, Seventy Summers.