PRESERVATION OF FOXES 107 



earned holidays, but he has no knowledge of wood- 

 craft, and he knows it. Worse still, his keeper 

 knows that he knows it, and acts accordingly. He 

 tells his master there are three litters of cubs in 

 the coverts under his charge. He perhaps takes 

 the trouble to show them to him, but he does not 

 trouble himself to say that at least two of the 

 litters will be carefully removed or destroyed, and 

 that as soon as the cubs in the other are able 

 to feed without the vixen, some fine moonlight 

 night she will go out and will return to her off- 

 spring no more. Here, in a nutshell, is the cause 

 of so many short-running foxes. They are either 

 removed cubs, which have no dam to show them 

 the way about a country, or their dam has been 

 ruthlessly murdered. And these are the foxes 

 which do the most damage in the poultry yard. 

 They have not the hunting faculty so strongly 

 developed as the fox that has been taken by his 

 dam in her nocturnal rambles, they are idle and 

 unenterprising. For though a fox is an animal of 

 prey, it must be admitted by all who have made a 

 study of his habits that he prefers to hunt for it. 



In the first place, if the shooting tenant wishes 

 to have both foxes and game, it is a very simple 

 matter, provided he is firm about it. Foxes and 

 pheasants may not live in harmony exactly, but 

 there can be foxes in sufficiency, good wild foxes 

 brought up wildly and as foxes should be, and 

 as much game on a place as any man has a right to 

 keep, bearing in mind the rights of the farming 

 tenant. This is a first principle, from which 

 there is no getting away. The best game estate I 

 know — I was almost saying the best in England, 

 and it certainly is one of the best — is never scarce 



