So when we had Clive out today he urinated a few times outdoors, including up against a tree trunk of one the silver maples in front of the house.
I made dinner this evening, and we had a boarding client who was coming to pick up her dog. Jenna took the client dog out for one last good walk about an hour after the sun set.
She came running back in the house telling me that she could smell red fox urine very strongly, and after careful examination, we noticed red fox tracks coming from across the road into our front lawn.
Clive is never taken near the road. He attracts too much unwanted attention, and our local conservation officer doesn’t like getting calls about a fox he knows is perfectly permitted and licensed. Plus, Clive could get spooked and pull his leash loose, and he would probably run into the road and be hit by a car.
So what happened was that a dog fox in the neighborhood caught wind of Clive’s markings around the silver maples. Last summer, I smelled where a red fox had urinated on one of these trees, as did every single one of our dogs, so I knew they were in the area. But now that we have a tame young male fox, the local breeding male fox is less than impressed with the young upstart leaving those markings on turf.
Clive is attracting the attention of the neighbors. My guess is we’re going to see lots more of their sign and maybe catch a glimpse of them as the late winter red fox mating season winds up.
I doubt that any of the local reds are cross foxes. All the ones I’ve seen in Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania have been the normal phase reds. But the foxes don’t know what color they are. They just operate by their nose and their base instincts.
Clive can never go wild. He’s from a long line of fur farmed foxes, and if he were to be released, he’s so friendly with people that he’d probably be suspected of being rabid and killed on sight.
So here is another aspect of owning a tame fox. The local red foxes don’t really care that much for the tame ones, and virtually everyone in the continental US lives near red foxes. If you bring a tame one into your home, you will be upsetting the locals, and I don’t just mean your human neighbors either.
I can’t really definitively tell by just by looking at him, but as far as you can ascertain does Clive have any of the sort of morphological differences said to be exhibited by other selectively bred captive foxes such as some of the Belyaev foxes? (Somewhat shorter muzzles and legs etc, although personally, when looking at the photos of the Belyaev foxes I’ve seen these differences have never appeared very visually obvious too me, probably due to being obscured by a fox’s naturally thick coat.) Presumably Clive isn’t from a line as intensely bred for tameness as the Belyaevs, but I’m curious at what point in the fox “domestication” process do the alleged physical changes begin to manifest. Unless of course the shortened snouts and limbs of the Russian foxes was due to some other factors of their breeding program entirely (maybe simple inbreeding) vs being bred for tameness.
I’ve been told that many strains of fur-farmed red fox have domestication features, not just the Belyaev foxes. Because the fur market has been bad for a long time, there have been many people breeding tamer red foxes from these foxes. You can get more money from a tame fox than you can from a pelt now.