Several times a day, the dingoes let out a collective howl that seems to make the chill in the air bite that much deeper. There are animals everywhere here – “here” being hours from anywhere in the New South Wales southern highlands. While you might reasonably expect a few wild animals on a property like this, this particular 100 acres is home to 45 dingoes, five cats, rabbits, a fish and a rescued wild rat called Ramsay that was, for a while, bottle-fed.

Then there are the foxes.

I am hunkered down in an enclosure with three red foxes (scientific name Vulpes vulpes) and a number of volunteers, many of whom have travelled from Canberra or Sydney to be here. One of the foxes is of particular interest to me, though, because unlike any other fox I’ve seen, he’s wearing a collar. He’s also been nattering at me for some time in that high and obscene way peculiar to foxes. Turns out he’s been asking me to kindly pass him a nearby slice of melon.

Sydney Fox Rescue sanctuary was founded, with all 14 of its foxes, in 2012. But the story of how its president, Charlie Jackson-Martin, went from being a run-of-the-mill foster carer of cats to practically living in the wild as a fox whisperer goes back a few years.

Family friends knew he fostered cat kittens, Jackson-Martin tells Guardian Australia. Then someone found a fox kit wandering alone on their property, and thought he might be able to bottle-feed it. That was one of their first foxes – Winnie. Then word started to get around.

“When other rescuers in Sydney got called about a fox, which happened a lot more than I realised, they would then be like, ‘Oh, I know Charlie, that guy, that cat rescuer with the fox,’” Jackson-Martin says.

Winnie kit being bottle-fed. Photograph: Sydney Fox Sanctuary

Things began to escalate. “At one point I had like, six foxes in my terrace house and all these cats, and then I realised that I needed to do something.”

Jackson-Martin and his partner moved to Canterbury thinking that they would have the space to take on a few more foxes. “Then the first year that we officially advertised that we would take rescue foxes, we got 14. And I went, ‘OK, Canterbury is not doable.’”

Canterbury was doubly undoable owing to relentless hounding online and off by anti-fox campaigners.

European red foxes were introduced to Australia by British colonists – “So were white Australians,” someone else visiting the sanctuary quips, sharply – and are one of nature’s most successful survivalists. They are abundant, classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species as of “least concern”. They are also destructive: there’s an estimated seven million of them in Australia, and their “dramatic and deleterious” effect on native wildlife has been well documented, with studies showing they are often a major cause of plummeting populations of local fauna.

I need to get them all chipped and all desexed by Monday

The effect of foxes on Australian wildlife parallels that of another introduced species: cats. While both have existed in Australia for two centuries, one is coddled by its human companions, while the other is shunned.

Jackson-Martin believes that both species are not being treated fairly by society. “Foxes and cats have both become scapegoats, with people greatly exaggerating their negative impact on the environment whilst simultaneously ignoring the much more devastating environmental impact of animal agriculture, mining, logging and other industries. Both foxes and cats deserve our care and compassion,” he says.

European red foxes were introduced to Australia by British colonists and are one of nature’s most successful survivalists. Photograph: Toby McCasker/The Guardian

Before the enactment of the Pest Control Order for foxes in 2014, it was possible to apply to the Local Land Services for a permit to keep foxes in captivity in NSW. But that doesn’t mean it was easy.

“We had lots of dramas with the council,” Jackson-Martin says. “Even though we had permits, they started to make new regulations about how many foxes you could have in their council area. They were like, ‘You can only have two,’ and we’re like, ‘Well, we have 14 and we have permits from the government that say we can have them.’”

The law around keeping foxes changed abruptly in December 2014.

Jackson-Martin says they were told with only a few days notice that permits for new foxes would no longer be available, and that any foxes that were not desexed or chipped could be seized. “So I called my vet and was like, ‘I’ve got 14 baby foxes, some of them weigh way too little to be put under anaesthetic, but I need to get them all chipped and all desexed by Monday.’ We just had this production line. She called in all these vet students on a Saturday and they all just had to go on our permit.”

Sydney Fox Sanctuary keeps its foxes in enclosures. Jackson-Martin believes there are concerns that the fox sanctuary is changing the culture around the animals.

The fox enclosure at Sydney Fox Sanctuary. Photograph: Toby McCasker/The Guardian

“If people start to see foxes as a companion and not as a pest, then they might not let [others] kill them in cruel and unusual ways,” he says. “If people start to see images of foxes like ours and they see foxes in people’s homes and they see foxes being adorable, then we get to this point where maybe people won’t tolerate the use of really noxious, cruel methods to kill them.”

Fox control in NSW is conducted through baiting programs using poison 1080, or sodium fluoroacetate, a highly toxic chemical. Though widely used – controversially – in New Zealand to control possums, and as rodenticide in Japan, Mexico, Korea and Israel, 1080 has been shown to cause significant collateral damage to nearby produce, domestic animals, waterways, and reportedly poses a fatal risk to adults and especially children that might ingest it. The United States’ Environmental Protection Agency banned its use entirely in 1972 after pressure from environmental groups about the poison’s collateral effect on native fauna.

The NSW Department of Primary Industries was contacted for comment about its fox control methods and permit policies by Guardian Australia but did not respond before publication.

Though the existing 50 fox permits held by various parties in the state remain valid, as of 31 March 2015 no new permits have been issued – something Jackson-Martin and Sydney Fox Rescue have been fighting ever since.

“I would like to see permits reinstated. It would be good to see more permits under various conditions,” he says, before clarifying: “I don’t want everybody having a fox. They’re not an apartment animal. And I think that I would rather see them in the wild, but there are some cases like Winnie, who was 65 grams. Winnie can’t live in the wild. He would die.”

Foxes are not supposed to be here, but they are here, and they don’t seem to be going away. Jackson-Martin believes the best approach to the issue is compassionate conservationism.

“The answer is to leave them alone,” he says. “They’ve been here for 185 years.… We can’t continue to interfere in the way that we are. Lethal control methods aren’t working. All we’re doing is continuing to meddle and make things worse.”