…during his 1981 review, Harris found cat remains in 2.1% of [fox] stomachs he studied, while a similar study on the food ecology of foxes in Sweden, conducted by Jan Englund during 1965, found cat remains in just under 2% of stomachs. Macdonald’s studies found lower levels, with cat fur in eight (0.4%) of the 1,939 scats they collected. The problem, of course, with making inferences based on remains is that the foxes could’ve scavenged the remains
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There have been several incidents, where a fox was believed to have killed a cat.
Ultimately, it is very rare for the fight to be observed, although there are some notable exceptions. In late August 2003 there was an incident in which six foxes were seen attacking a 12-year-old tortoiseshell cat in a back garden in Corstorphine, Edinburgh. One of the cat’s owners managed to scare the foxes away and rushed it to the vet, but unfortunately its wounds were too severe and it had to be euthanized. This case is unique because it involved several foxes. Foxes are solitary hunters and do not hunt in packs; the parents do, however, teach their cubs how to hunt and cubs may accompany them on hunting trips – this is presumably what was happening here as, by this time, the cubs would be almost fully grown and almost indistinguishable from the adults. Another incident happened much more recently, in August 2010, and involved a fox entering a house in Folkstone, Kent through an upstairs window and attacking an eight-week-old kitten. As with the 2003 incident, the owner intervened and caused the fox to drop the cat and flee, but the kitten had to be euthanized several days later. This is the first case of a fox entering a house and attacking a cat, raising the question of whether someone locally had been feeding it in their house prior to this. The final example I plan to include is one e-mailed to me by a lady in Hampshire who, in the early hours of the morning of 23rd January 2011, witnessed a fox dragging a cat outside their house (part of her e-mail is reproduced here, with her permission):
“At about 3.30 in the morning I was awaken by a kind of strangled cat wail. I live in a surburban area with flats opposite and we often have cats fights so running to the window (we have a very large cat who often fights!) we were very shocked to see a medium size fox dragging a struggling cat by the scruff of the neck infront of the flats - about 15 metres, stopping to readjust and then across the road towards our house. At that point (another 10 metres) my friend made a loud hissing noise not knowing what else to do and this startled the fox which dropped the cat. The cat immediately ran very fast away while the fox looked up an then started walking past our house (opposite direction from where it had been running with the cat), looking at the house then glancing back towards where the cat had run. The fox was just walking slowly and calmly away. It was not our cat, but it was a medium size cat, not small or ‘kitten looking’ and it ran fast away very fast.”
… decapitation and the smell of fox on the body are both strongly associated with cats killed by foxes. In his Town Fox, Country Fox book Brian Vezey-Fitzgerald described two instances where one of his cats appeared to have been in a fight with a fox and, in the first instance, he noted how the cat smelt strongly of fox; several readers have contacted me saying much the same.
I have heard it argued that the 2003 incident actually represented a case of parents showing their cubs how to hunt cats and, while I feel this is an unsubstantiated conclusion, it cannot be disproven.
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reports from some farmers suggesting that rural foxes are often very hostile towards farm cats. In the same e-mail describing the fox dragging the cat, the reader told me:
“My grandfather, who was a farmer in Sussex, often berated fox lovers, citing an instance of his farm cats being dragged screaming down the road by a fox which killed it despite being chased - in daylight.”
