If a red fox tunnels under suburban toolsheds or burrows beneath greens on nearby golf courses, no one can guarantee it a long, healthy life by hiring a trapper to move it to a nearby woodlot or even a rural wetland.
That’s what researcher David Drake concluded during his recent talk at the annual meeting of Wisconsin’s Wildlife Society. Drake, a professor at UW-Madison, gave his talk a blunt title in the conference’s three-day seminar schedule: “Urban red fox translocation leads to dispersal and low survival.”
As UW-Madison researchers repeatedly confirmed over the past 20 years, red foxes wreck stuff when living among humans. And though they’re undoubtedly cute when young and pretty when mature, mitigating their damage isn’t easy, and moving them elsewhere isn’t necessarily humane. Despite everyone’s best intentions, they often soon die one way or another.
Drake reviewed what happened to eight young Madison-area red foxes that researchers fitted with GPS-transmitting collars before releasing them within a few miles of their former homes. Some were turned loose in a park on Madison’s east side, and the others at a golf course or a conservation park on the city’s southeast side.
Once released, the young foxes—six males and two females—fled quickly north and east toward less developed habitats, even though they’d been born in fairly urban settings. The distances they moved ranged from 2 to 53 miles. In the months that followed, only one of the eight “translocated” foxes was verified alive.
Three were road-killed fairly quickly. The first one got Goodyeared two days after its release, while another got Firestoned 22 days later, and the third got Michelined 130 days later.
A fourth fox wandered into a hangar at the Dane County Regional Airport and had to be shot to ensure it didn’t cross a runway and endanger aircraft. A fifth fox died, but the researchers couldn’t verify what killed it.
Researchers couldn’t monitor two of the foxes because their tracking collars quit functioning upon their release, despite the units being tested and verified shortly before.
If nothing else, the study provided more data for the law of unintended consequences. Most folks don’t want to kill or harm wildlife, even when the prettiest critters eat flowers, devour gardens, foul lawns, or collapse walkways. Likewise, everyone wants to rescue “abandoned” cubs, fawns, and fledglings, and they’re all concerned by drooling deer and mangy coyotes.
But more folks might consider accepting the word and experience of biologists or ornithologists when told that quick death is often the most merciful way to mitigate damage. Academicians even have a name for what happens when good intentions cause unintended harm: pathological altruism. You’ll even find books about it, with subtitles like “The Hidden Agendas of Needy Helpers” and “Why Being Too Nice Can Hurt You and Everyone Around You.”
Meanwhile, professors like Drake, his colleague Tim Van Deelen, and their many UW-Madison graduate and Ph.D. researchers keep studying and critiquing their findings. Therefore, they anticipate questions like, “Why not release troublesome foxes back into the urban or suburban neighborhood they came from?”
Well, because the homeowners or business owners who complained didn’t want them back in the ’hood. Further, no university or agency has reform schools for wildlife. They can’t be taught how to live among city folk and leave their stuff alone. Besides, even though most folks don’t want to euthanize furry or feathery nuisances themselves, they’ll stay quiet if someone does it for them.
But even when red foxes settle in quiet city parks, green spaces, and backyard woodlots, they still face long odds. Yes, even if they’re adults that look both ways before crossing roads. And yes, Drake and his students have observed that behavior in urban foxes. Maybe those adult foxes grew up in densely developed neighborhoods with narrow roads, speed bumps, and low speed limits. They survived their youths despite behaving like easily distracted 16-year-old drivers who look too quickly and brake too slowly.
Meanwhile, foxes living on a city’s outskirts with more space between homes often die at higher rates beneath bumpers and Bridgestones. Those areas typically have wider streets and boulevards with higher speed limits, as well as more drivers operating at highly varying speeds.
Still others ask why someone can’t release problem foxes far outside town into a big woods or wetland. Well, because many rural areas across America are flush with coyotes, and, as Van Deelen and his research students verified, coyotes kill or persecute foxes infringing on their turf.
“Coyotes push foxes up into culverts and farmsteads and other things associated with roads, so they still have high road mortality,” Van Deelen said.
Plus, no matter where a typical 10- to 12-pound red fox lives in town, it eventually encounters 50- or 100-pound pet dogs that break leashes or cheap chains. Likewise, urban foxes are more likely to contract mange and highly pathogenic avian influenza than their rural counterparts. In other words, the “mean streets” of our nation’s biggest cities aren’t any nicer to wildlife than to people.
Studies like Drake’s also help wildlife rehabilitators decide how best to spend their time, expertise, and limited resources. Most wildlife rehab facilities struggle to stay in business, given that birds and wildlife don’t carry cash, insurance, or credit cards.
Therefore, rehabilitators can’t treat every bird, mammal, reptile, or amphibian that kind-hearted people bring in. Should they spend time and money on one critter with little hope of long-term survival when research and experience suggest they spend their resources elsewhere? Most people are just fine letting others make those calls, too.
After all, the more that universities study Mother Nature, the more they confirm her indifference to life, suffering, and altruism.
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