Natural History

A West Virginia gray fox in a tree. Source for photo.  

For those of you who have never seen one of these animals, a gray fox is a pretty bizarre species.

It superficially looks like a fox, but it behaves unlike any other.

Its ancestors also split off from the rest of the dog family 9 to 10 million years ago, which means that it is as distantly related to a domestic dog that an animal can be and still be part of the dog family.

And yes, they do climb trees, and when they move, they move like cats.

I think a lot of cougar sightings in the Eastern US are actually just misidentified gray foxes.

But although this animal is clearly a dog, it’s a sort of dog that has evolved to be somewhat like a cat.

It’s not actually clear if its cat-like morphology is a primitive canid feature that this species retains or if it’s something the animal has evolved in parallel with certain small cat species.

And this has led more than one or two people to speculate about gray foxes actually being some sort of bizarre species of cat.

In her extensive interviews with New Jersey foxchasers, Mary Hufford found two who claimed that “the red fox is in the dog family, and the gray fox is in the cat family.”

Of course, this folk taxonomy is crap, but New Jersey isn’t the only place where gray foxes have been called cats.

In southern Mexico, it is called gato de monte:  “mountain cat,” a name that is also used for the bobcat. In Honduras, it is called gato cervan, which I’m translating as “deer-like cat.”

It’s certainly true that the gray fox is not closely related to the red fox– or the other foxes of North America, the swift, the kit, and the arctic fox. The swift, the kit, and arctic fox are all closely related to each other. Swifts and kits produce fertile offspring when crossed, and it’s likely they do the same with arctic foxes.  Red foxes produce sterile hybrids with arctic foxes.

But no one has ever crossed a red fox with a gray.

And that’s not because the gray fox isn’t a canid.

It’s because the two aren’t closely related to each other– the exact same reason why there are no dog and red fox hybrids. (No matter how many times people claim they exist.)

I think the term gray fox is too banal for this animal.

I have thought about the necessity of renaming it to fit its uniqueness as a distinct American animal. Not only is it not closely related to other foxes in the northern hemisphere, it’s not closely related to all those endemic South American wild dogs, which are actually more closely related to wolves and dogs than they are to the true foxes.

I have perused the historical literature on this species, and I am making several proposals.

For right now, I suggest that we just call it the feline fox– the real cat dog.