Naturally Connected: The fox's tale

This is Living Planet, I'm Neil King.

And this week, the final episode of our Naturally Connected series

delves into the fantastic world of foxes.

Foxes have walked the Earth in some form or another for much longer than humans.

How welcome they are is debatable.

In Germany alone, more than 400,000 foxes are killed by hunters every year.

Others fall prey to cars and sickness.

Of those that managed to evade the guns, traffic and disease, there is ever more pressure to leave the countryside for urban areas and whatever fate awaits them there.

Grim figures, but Tamsin Walker's episode on foxes will leave you with a smile on your face.

Just put your feet up and listen all the way through to the end.

In the opening page of George Saunders' Dark Story,

comic fable, the eponymous Fox 8 explains how he came to understand, speak and even

write what he calls human, with a Y that is.

One day, he writes, walking near one of your human houses, smelling all the interest with

snout I heard from inside the most amazing sound.

Turns out what their sound is was the human voice making words.

They sounded great.

They sounded like pretty music.

I listened to those words until the sun went down,

when all of a sudden I was like Fox 8, Crazy Nut.

When sun goes down, world goes dark.

Skedaddle home or else there can be danger.

And danger there is.

Not invited in by the cover of darkness, however,

but by the decimation of his woodland home

to make way for the construction of one Foxview Commons shopping mall

and the accompanying notion of some clear delineation

between human and non-human territory.

The story has stayed with me,

not only for its unique and imaginative narrator,

but for the unforgettable way it conveys a message

we've heard so often by now that we must surely know it off by heart.

A message about our very human ability

to disregard other species in pursuit of our wants and habits,

and our sometimes brutally low tolerance threshold

for coexistence with the non-domesticated.

silent proof of this trait

was published last year in the form of a study conducted in South Africa.

It showed how some 95% of wild animals,

such as giraffes, elephants, zebras, hyenas and rhinos,

have evolved to be more afraid of human voices than of lions,

the apex predators that have been eating them for millennia.

The findings were broadly taken to cement existing evidence

that wildlife around the world fears no species

like it does the so-called human superpredator.

But does the same go for foxes, whose rusty elegance I sometimes see flitting past my front door,

sitting quietly in a city park, strolling down a busy street, or striding across a schoolyard?

Each encounter is as magical as it is unique,

but taken together, they've left me with the impression that somehow foxes are not uncomfortable living in a city park.