Canis lupus hominis

From UpdocFilms

I don’t normally recommend owning wildlife, so let me say that I do not think foxes make good pets.

That said, isn’t it really interesting how this terrier and fox live together?

I don’t know whether this terrier is a Jack Russell, which, ironically, were bred to bolt foxes from their dens, or a rat terrier, which sometimes have drop ears as this dog does.

I chose this video not because of the relationship between the dog and fox, though.

I wanted a good close up of North America’s most unique canid.

As I have said previously, this species is my favorite wild dog. It is truly a unique animal. It has raised strand of black hair along the top of its tail. When one gets its hackles up, this hair really stands up.  It is almost as if it has hackles on its tail.

It can also climb trees, and when I say “climb trees,” I mean almost as well as a raccoon or cat. These foxes also live in Mexico, Central America, and Venezuela and Colombia. Because of their arboreal habits, the animal was often known as a  “mountain cat” or “deer cat” (because it looks like cat with a deer’s face!)

The first one I saw in the wild was running after a cottontail rabbit, and I thought it was some species of cat. It ran in the same fluid manner one sees in cats, but when you looked at its head, you could obviously tell it was a canid.

In my area, where the red foxes and gray foxes live in the same basic area, the grays dominate the reds. Red foxes avoid grays like the plague. The two are roughly the same size, because the red fox here isn’t one of the larger subspecies. The grays are proportionally stronger than the reds, which are built more like greyhounds. Grays are built like big cats, with proportionally shorter legs and heavier bone.

When my grandpa was shooting foxes for their pelts using recorded calls,  one could never get a red fox to respond to a gray fox call. However, one could get a gray to respond to a red call. (Calling foxes in this way was legal when he was doing.) The reds just did not want to have to fight a tough gray fox, but a gray would want to drive a red from its territory.

Now, the two don’t drive each other out of the same area for a very simple reason. Grays prefer deep timber and dense thickets in which to live. Reds prefer more edge land, with access to marginal farm land, some open fields, and some undergrowth in which to hide. Thus, the two do not share the same habitat even if they live relatively close to each other.

With the arrival (or possible return) of coyotes to this part of the world, the red foxes have only now begun to adjust to coyote predation. Reds den closer to houses and towns to avoid the coyotes. Coyotes and red foxes share roughly the same habitat, and they often encounter each other. Coyotes will kill off smaller competitors, and the reds are often targeted. Gray foxes do not share the same habitat with the coyotes, for they still prefer the dense thickets. And they can take to the trees should any coyote appear.