{"id":223430,"date":"2025-10-19T00:39:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-19T00:39:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/223430\/"},"modified":"2025-10-19T00:39:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-19T00:39:12","slug":"foxes-got-into-my-car-that-was-the-beginning-of-the-nightmare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/223430\/","title":{"rendered":"Foxes got into my car. That was the beginning of the nightmare"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few months ago, a neighbour issued a polite, if terrifying, warning: never leave a garden door ajar because the increasingly brazen foxes lurking at the back of our terrace had begun to slip inside.<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t worry,\u201d I assured my neighbour, a little too smugly in retrospect. \u201cWe have our own four-legged defence system.\u201d Our territorial cats, Jack and Luna, are known to spend dusk alert at the back door, side by side, staring at their russet rivals over the fence. The foxes wouldn\u2019t dare. <\/p>\n

There were other warning signs. One day my wife left a pair of Birkenstock sandals outside by the hammock and found the chewed remains the next morning, buckles detached like tiny, metallic trophies. But the moment my cat-brag really came back to haunt me arrived last month, when the foxes wrote off our family car. <\/p>\n

\"Hugo<\/p>\n

It was a drizzly Saturday morning and I was at home working while my wife rushed to get our daughter to her 9am art class. A minute later, they were back through the front door, art abandoned. It transpired that someone had left the car door open the night before and the foxes had spotted an opportunity. My wife recalled asking our younger son to close it behind him as she walked to the house in the pouring rain, arms laden with groceries and school bags. In his defence, he\u2019s only six. <\/p>\n

With three children, the car is perpetually filthy, but the condition it was in after a skulk of young foxes had spent the night playing inside was beyond comparison. (I imagined they were cubs, the fox equivalents of our children, making hay while the sun \u2014 or should that be moon? \u2014 shone.) The first thing that hit me was the smell, an indescribable stench<\/a> that I imagine to be something like the odour emitted by an angry skunk. <\/p>\n

Adding to our woes, a floor mat in the footwell had been shoved aside \u2014 by foxes or children, I don\u2019t know \u2014 so the creatures could helpfully deposit their mess directly onto the carpet. Aside from the biohazard, the material damage was shocking. Two children\u2019s car seats were ripped apart, foam spilling out, buckles chewed off and discarded nearby. <\/p>\n

The appeal of the car seats, I speculated, was probably down to the huge volume of dropped food and crumbs I vacuum out of them every few months. A scooter handle had been nibbled and a prized light-up helmet ripped apart. Most shockingly, three of the car\u2019s seven seatbelts had been eaten \u2014 one had been bitten clean off and two others chewed almost all the way through, including the driver\u2019s. <\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Seatbelts were chewed and children\u2019s car seats ripped apart<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

We bought the car, a 2010 Toyota Verso I found on Autotrader five years ago after moving back from the US. It had done 88,000 miles in previous lives as a minicab in Cambridge and as another family\u2019s car in Surrey. We had recently taken it over the 150,000-mile mark. Like all the aged, slightly battered cars I\u2019ve owned, I\u2019d grown strongly attached to it. It had taken us safely north during the eerie quiet of the Christmas 2020 lockdown and to this summer\u2019s last great hurrah at the Green Man festival in Wales. I felt I couldn\u2019t simply abandon it. <\/p>\n

I began scrubbing, then took it to the valet car wash. The men there expressed sympathy, but when I picked it up half an hour later, they politely confirmed the smell was, sadly, non-removable. I then drove the seatbelt-free car to a local branch of We Buy Any Car, windows wide open to air it out. True to its pledge, We Buy Any Car offered me \u00a3200. The man there thought it might be possible to buy some secondhand seatbelts on eBay and get a garage to install them, but said he thought it would ultimately be a futile exercise given the car\u2019s mileage. <\/p>\n

He looked almost relieved as I got back inside to drive home, still convinced I could do better. I wondered if the insurers might help and made the call \u2014 only to be told it would be written off, marked down as \u201cmalicious damage, fox\u201d. Finally, I admitted defeat: the car was a goner. I called a salvage company. <\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Since this incident took place, I\u2019ve started seeing fox car crime everywhere. All hell has broken loose in Portchester, in rural Hampshire, where a gang of foxes has been terrorising a village\u2019s cars by chewing through the brake wires underneath. <\/p>\n

Has fox crime always happened? Apparently so. Our neighbour\u2019s camper van, often parked near our car, had its brake wires attacked last year, which cost \u00a3500 to repair. Graham Le Blond, who runs Fox-a-Gon, a non-lethal fox-control business, says he gets five to ten calls a month about foxes damaging cables. The worst case of car damage he\u2019s heard over the years was a Nissan dealership where cables on 15 vehicles were destroyed in one night thanks to a den nearby and many fox cubs in the area. Part of the problem, Le Blond says, is that in the past few years car brake manufacturers have been using \u201canimal derivative products\u201d for coating to avoid single-use plastic. <\/p>\n

He had never come across a story like ours before, though. The clue, he thinks, was in the timing. Our car was ransacked about a month ago, around the same time as \u201cdispersal season\u201d, when fox cubs born in March who haven\u2019t left of their own accord are kicked out of their homes. \u201cSome of them are quite immature and they get into various scrapes \u2026 it may have just been one of them that found its way into your car,\u201d Le Blond said, and agreeing that it was probably the smell of food that drew them in. \u201cWe\u2019ve got something like four million receptors in our nose for smell and foxes have got 40 million,\u201d he added. \u201cEven if it had been washed or hoovered they would still be able to smell it.\u201d <\/p>\n

We now have a new car, and the financial pain of this incident is starting to recede. A cousin in the US put our experience into perspective on a family WhatsApp group. They too had had an unwelcome visitor when they left their car unlocked on a trip to the Smoky Mountains this summer \u2014 a bear got inside. Now that\u2019s one mess I wouldn\u2019t want to clean up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A few months ago, a neighbour issued a polite, if terrifying, warning: never leave a garden door ajar…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":223431,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[49,48,66,323],"class_list":{"0":"post-223430","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223430\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/223431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}