Civilization has brought foxes a sort of epicurean unemployment insurance.

Civilization has brought foxes a sort of epicurean unemployment insurance. Wounded game, carcasses left by poachers, carelessly-managed poultry farms, garbage dumps, and untidy picnic grounds provide an endless free-lunch counter; and racing highway traffic specializes in pre-masticated lunches. The down-bill furrow is another boon that keeps the fox from walking on his heels. As soon as the shade of dense virgin forests held food and prey to a minimum. Supporting evidence of this is shown by parallel circumstances that exist today in remaining wilderness locations. But ultimately settlers cleared the land and plowed their furrows up and down the hills. When erosion, gurgling happily down these ill-conceived ditches, brought soil depletion, abandoned farms resulted. These stripped and forsaken acres fit the fox as though he were poured into them. Matted pastures with their fence-veins varicose with brush, rheumatic orchards, woodlots senile with shrub and briar, old hilltop fields remembered only by the windhese are the locations where the red fox likes to hang his hat.

However, all this only partially explains why the red fox has contrived to stay out of that color numerically. His individual construction is the pay-offet propulsion in fur pants, complete with radar and an automatic pilot. He can out-nose a tabloid columnist, out-listen a housewife on a party-line telephone, out-see a sailor on leave, out-climb an aspirant towards the social register, out-figure Baby Snooks and out-patience her father. A pair of foxes can run an ordinary dog to a frazzle without ever shifting out of second gear. 1 fox could do it, really, but it is not their nature to become selfish. Many a seventy-five-pound dog has earned tile right to stop at the first lamppost inside the Pearly Gates because he pursued a ten-pound fox too far out on the thin ice of winter, too near a cliff's glazed edge, or also close to a trap intended for his quarry.

Contrary to clamorous opinion, the fox's financial significance is not so entirely negative that the very best that can he said of him is that worse items could be. To trappers he is really a capital asset in fur-lined bonds amounting to scores of countless dollars annually. He takes an huge toll of numerous and destructive rodents, especially those animated meat factories, mice and rabbits. He is an irreplaceable buffer to the chase in regions where other game species are scarce. He is responsible for the development of the American foxhound. His contribution towards the sportsman's menu has given foxhunters appetites second to none. He requires the blame for the sins of less magnificent characters in fur and feathers, and still trots along his buoyant way with tail afloat upon the philosophical present of his wisdom.

The fox is no third class moron; but neither can he stand up indefinitely to everything that man decides to throw at him.

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