While some of the animals are released back into the wild once they are well enough, Hemstock lets some of the animals who would not be able to survive on their own stay with him in Nottinghamshire.<\/p>\n
As well as Fern, at the moment Addie, Ben and Cleo are all staying with him in his adopted fox family.<\/p>\n
“I had Ben from about 10 days old, and we bonded immediately,” he said.<\/p>\n
“The idea was that I would get him through his cubhood and get him back into the wild, but we bonded so much it would be cruel to release him – he wouldn’t survive, they need their mother’s rearing to prepare them to survive in the wild, and he wouldn’t have done that.<\/p>\n
“We also found a single mate that needed a male, so we paired them up – it was love at first sight.”<\/p>\n
Hemstock is now a trustee of charity Fox Angels, who helped him learn to look after the animals, and last year he released a charity single – a cover of 1974 Sweet single Fox on the Run – to raise awareness of their work.<\/p>\n
He said local vets and his neighbours have also been supportive of his efforts to help the foxes, who he said “have taught me a lot” about life.<\/p>\n
“It’s not easy, you’ve got to be prepared to make the commitment,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Foxes are kind of like people – we’re all different, there’s things that we like and dislike about one another, and some people can live together and some can’t, and that’s the same with these.<\/p>\n
“They’re very temperamental, but loving.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While some of the animals are released back into the wild once they are well enough, Hemstock lets…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":460592,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-460591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=460591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460591\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/460592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=460591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=460591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=460591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}