The whole house was surrounded by them but I remember sliding the patio doors that led into the back garden open just a tiny crack.The fox shoved it’s pointy nose into the gap and growled menacingly. There was no escape from them, foxes had entirely ringed the house and each one of the furry demons had it’s nose pressed tight against which ever surface it was facing. They stood in almost military formation, packed together shoulder to muscular shoulder, brushes standing straight out from their hocks – a feral canine army. This is the only dream sequence that I remember with any clarity from my childhood and the nightmare image has never left me.

We grew up in suburban Essex and when we first moved into our family house in 1975 there was a small wooded area at the back with a couple of ponds and many, many foxes dens. I would regularly poke about there with my sister and despite the dream can’t remember any concious fear of foxes or even encountering one while we played amongst the trees. As we grew older they were a common sight in the back garden and even when the copse was redeveloped they stuck around. Another childhood memoy recalled with as much lucidity as the fox dream is seeing my sister Alev lying on her back on the back garden grass at dusk on a warm summer’s evening. Her arms were sticking out perpendicularly from her sides and she held a fox treat in her pudgy five year old hand. We all waited with baited breath (and she with baited hand) as the little mangy fox crept nearer and nearer and finally daringly sniffed her. İt’s timorousness was matched only by our excitement.

We still see and hear foxes around the house but now we are no longer a lucky minority, in fact urban foxes have run the gamut of images from rare wild interloper to semi-tame semi-nocturnal wild dog. According to estimates there may well be 10,000 living in Central London and 30,000 within Greater London (all apparently building their earths under garden sheds now). If there was an award for sneaky survival these animals would bear gold ribbons and furry red rosettes. Most recently I saw a healthy looking individual with a broad bushy brush totter on slim legs across my parent’s driveway stopping only to spray an unlucky shrub. He left and when our dogs came out a short time later they set about disarming the offending area from fox threat by barking loudly and respraying the same resigned and unfortunate greenery with their own legitimate ammoniac.

Sezgin, who is still here patiently awaiting the arrival of his child, is amazed by the audacity of our local foxes. While they exist in his village and are a curse to all chicken owners he has rarely seen one. To his mind our urban invaders are no longer wild animals. My mother’s frequent donations to their diet bemuse him too, not that she feeds them, but that they actually take the food. In Turkey wild animals would not come and pick up waste food out of both   embarassment and in fear that it might be a poisoned trap.

Not everyone takes the same benign attitude to foxes as my mother. Friends of mine who recently saw mum getting the fox’s dinner ready were swift to warn us that fox faeces are ‘poisonous’ and that we would be better off calling pest control rather than ‘encouraging’ foxes. They claim to suffer from fox nuisance and tell us that they have to get up early on a Thursday to put their bins out as if they put them out the night before collection the foxes would rip them up to get at food leftovers. On closer questioning it turns out that someone in their household is up at the relevant time in the morning anyway and that the bins are more often shredded by their own dogs – but they like to blame the little red creatures anyway.

In fact fox poo is not poisonous and while, like all wild creatures, foxes do carry some harmful bacteria they are of a type that rarely transmits to humans or even domestic dogs. That is not to say that urban foxes are never a problem, they often dig up gardens and flower beds looking for worms and sometimes buried family pets. Some overstep the boundaries of household etiquette and will wander into homes it they find doors open and scoff the cat’s supper but these incidences are as rare as attacks on cats and babies (mainly the stuff of urban legend). Foxes may be pesky but they also perform stirling work in keeping down rat and mice numbers in urban environments and watching cubs play in the back garden is a highlight in the lives of many city children who otherwise would never see an uncaged wild animal.

Despite this there are householders who cannot stand the intrusions and the demand for urban fox culling has grown in the last few years. Bruce Lyndsay-Smith achieved noteriety last year when he was featured on the front page of the Evening Standard squatting next to 70 foxes he had killed in one night. He is one of the few pest control officials who is licensed to carry a firearm and has been recruited by private householders, football clubs and golf course owners to prey upon the predators. Sometimes he traps them and then removes the animals to a different location but more often he is asked to shoot them. İt seems a drastic way to solve a minor problem and The Mammal Society claim it is no solution at all as foxes are territorial and when you take one away another simply moves in to take over the territory. Perhaps in the not too distant future we will see red coats and hounds pounding the pathways of suburban Essex in an attempt to eradicate a beautiful wild animal mislabelled an urban blight.