Shooting foxes is controversial, but legal. Phil, 63, first considered it three decades ago, after a fox ripped off the head of his daughter’s guinea pig, which was kept in their garden. A plumber who likes to hunt, he has 10 guns in his bedroom safe. He tied a pillow around the barrel of one as a makeshift silencer and waited, but the fox never showed up. Then a friend’s two dachshunds were attacked, and he “cracked” a couple of foxes in her garden. “From there, it just snowballed,” he said.

His clients include tennis clubs, schools, urban farms and families, typically with small children or pets. (One woman hired him to avenge her Chihuahua after a necropsy found fox bites on its neck.)

He charges 75 pounds, nearly $120, for the first fox and about £50 for every fox after that, disposal included. The cadavers go to a friend’s maggot farm, where they are turned into chicken feed. “Poetic justice,” Phil calls it.

But foxes have at least as many fans as enemies here. Some Londoners feed them regularly. Others wire up their gardens with night vision and cameras to stream videos online. Facebook pages like Urban Fox Defenders (“A page for those who are sick of the reckless and mindless demonization of our town foxes”) have thousands of likes.

When 9-month-old twins Lola and Isabella Koupparis were hospitalized with face and arm injuries after a fox had entered their North London bedroom in 2010, their mother received so many online threats for giving foxes a bad name that she was provided police protection.

Some Britons have never entirely gotten over the 2004 ban on fox hunting, the kind where horseback riders in red blazers give chase with a pack of dogs. After some 700 hours of debate, Parliament chose the animals’ rights over a very British tradition. The hunting lobby claims fox numbers have exploded since.