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[title]‘I’m sorry, but this is really dangerous’, shouts a plummy voiced, irate man, gesturing first to his pet beagles, and then to Pumpkin the fox, walking peacefully on a lead. We’re in Hampstead Heath, and I’m bombarding Pumpkin’s companion, vet Ana Lapaz, with questions about what it’s like to live alongside a fox. Evidently, I’m not the only one who needs schooling. Normally, when beagles and foxes meet, it’s in a horrific bloodbath (overseen by humans in stupid costumes). But this time, things are different. With well practised polish, Lapaz tells the man that her foxy charge is blind and brain damaged, and has met hundreds of beagles without incident: ‘Pumpkin doesn’t smell like a fox to them, because she’s clean and she lives with dogs’. The man still seems disgruntled, but he continues on his way.
How did I get here? It started months ago, when a family of fox cubs was born under my neighbour’s shed. I’d wake up early to watch them playfighting or sunbathing, round and fat as puppies. One cub, the boldest one, liked to come to my window and look in at the comforts of my living room with the ravenous wonder of a Victorian orphan surveying a laden bakery counter. And for a fleeting moment, I felt like I could just let him in, sit him on the sofa next to me, and together we’d watch something we’d both enjoy, like The Basil Brush Show or Chicken Run.
Living in London makes for constant encounters with astonishingly bold wildlife: foxes that appear in a fiery glow of street lamp light at dusk, pigeons that polish off leftover chips in pub beer gardens, rodents who navigate your kitchen like they’re auditioning for a live action version of Ratatouille. It feels like these animals live so closely alongside humans that they’re almost tame. I become fixated on a question: is it actually possible to adopt a fox, squirrel or pigeon? Is it a safe or responsible thing to do? What are the limits of friendship between humans and London’s wildlife? And the best people to answer that question are the intrepid wildlife rescuers who are bringing injured and orphaned animals home, in every corner of this city.
A beautiful friendship
Lapaz and I are cosied up in a booth at nearby pub The Spaniard’s Inn, as she pets Pumpkin, as docile as any lapdog. For a moment, my fox-adoption dreams feel tantalisingly possible. But Lapaz is keen to stress that at home, Pumpkin is seriously hard work. ‘I always say foxes are like a cross between a dog, a cat, and a ninja,’ she elaborates. ‘They are so intelligent, smart, very cheeky. I currently have fox cubs in my house and they’ll drive you mad within a day, they jump to incredible heights and chew everything. They’re cute, but they’re wild animals’.
Pumpkin is rare: she’s lost her natural wariness of humans because she has toxoplasmosis, a parasitic disease that’s spread by cats (upsettingly, it’s designed to make the rodents they infect both fearless and dangerously obsessed with the scent of feline urine). And Lapaz is pretty singular too: she’s a vet who's built expertise in treating wild animals, while most of her colleagues confine themselves to the vastly more lucrative business of domestic and farm animals. She’s one of a loyal band of animal rescuers who are urging people to value London’s wildlife as much as they prize their pedigree pets.
‘With the cost of living crisis, not many people can keep cats and dogs in London, because of money or their tenancy situation. So friendship with squirrels is the next best thing,’ says Natalia Doran, whose non-profit organisation Urban Squirrels rehabilitates injured and orphaned squirrels in two specially kitted out rooms of her west London home, which is decorated with cushions and pictures starring the little grey critters.
She began rescuing squirrels as a way of helping her animal-loving autistic son, but quickly fell in love with them, too. ‘I admire their intelligence, which means they make friends with people very quickly,’ she says.
‘There’s one elderly lady I know who sits and has breakfast outside with a squirrel she calls Peanut. Even in the middle of winter when it’s drizzling, she’ll put her coat on and share her porridge with him. It’s true friendship.’
Still, every friendship needs boundaries.
‘I would never recommend that someone keeps a wild squirrel as a pet,’ says Doran. ‘They’ll be climbing up your curtains, and chewing things they shouldn’t be chewing’.
But although grey squirrels would make nightmare housemates, they started out in this country as glorified pets, brought over by meddling Victorian gentlemen such as the 11th Duke of Bedford, who thought they made a picturesque addition to his country estate.
If you bond with a pigeon, it’s an amazing experience
London’s familiar grey pigeons have a similar origin story. ‘Pigeons don’t belong in the wild. They’re descended from birds that escaped from captivity, so they make wonderful pets,’ says part time bird rescuer Alberto. ‘If you bond with a pigeon, it’s an amazing experience. It’ll come and sit on your shoulder and preen you. They have the same complex emotional sentience as a dog or a cat, but most people never experience it.’
Husband and wife duo Alberto and Inese bonded over rescuing birds together. Lockdown walks past the lakes of Hyde Park inspired them to do something to help local wildlife. Now, their flat hosts an ever-changing cast of feathered friends - ‘please don’t tell our landlord!’ says Inese, ‘yeah, I don’t think he knows we’ve kept injured swans overnight in our bathtub, and we’d like to keep it that way,’ agrees Alberto. Two pigeons (Frenchie and Figura) are permanent residents, and they’ve become doted-upon members of the family, their enclosure decorated with fake plants and pictures of beautiful landscapes.
On TikTok, pigeon lovers show off their oh-so-tame pigeon buddies. And because pigeons can’t be toilet trained, they’re often sporting multicoloured nappies that Inese sells in her Etsy shop: designs including fake Burberry, cannabis leaves, or rainbow ones saying ‘Love is Love’ (after all, studies have shown that homosexuality in pigeons is pretty widespread).
Still, not all pigeon rescuers feel this way. Beth socialises and rehabilitates injured or orphaned pigeons in her sanctuary made from a converted shipping container in the garden of her semi-detached east London home, keeping 25 pigeons or so at a time with the aim of creating a flock that she can release together, when they’re healthy enough. ‘We advocate keeping wild animals wild,’ she says.
Mauve is an exception: ‘she was found as a tiny baby after she fell out of her nest. Most pigeons we take in lose interest in humans, but she always wanted to be with people. We tried to wild her up, but it failed. The rewilding didn’t work. She demands your attention: she loves cuddles, and she likes to sit on your shoulder and preen your hair.’
I’m quickly realising that the boundaries between ‘wild’ and ‘tame’ animals are fuzzier and more porous than you might think. ‘Wild’ animals are quick to establish reciprocal relationships with humans when it benefits them: famously, crows will bring gifts for people who feed them, such as Gabi Mann, a girl from Seattle who collected a massive haul of sea glass and foraged trinkets. The genetic differences between ‘wild’ and ‘tame’ animals are often surprisingly slight, too. The notorious Russian fox experiment aimed to study the process of domestication in real time on an isolated ranch in Siberia, by breeding the tamest 10% of each generation of foxes. As a study report describes, within just six generations, ‘researchers produced a subset of foxes that licked the hand of experimenters, could be picked up and petted, whined when humans departed, and wagged their tails when humans approached.’
The threat
If your human mate was sick, you’d hotfoot it to A&E. But being friends with wildlife is a lot tougher.
‘It’s very difficult to find a vet who cares about helping wildlife,’ says Alberto, who’s one of the many rescuers who has sought unofficial (but thorough) medical training so that he can help wounded birds. ‘I thought that if I don’t do this myself, no one’s going to do it.’
‘The RSPCA does a great job with pets, but I’m sorry to say that they’re not great with wildlife. If they’re injured, the protocol is often just to put them to sleep.’ This isn’t a viewpoint the RSPCA’s spokesperson agrees with. ‘The RSPCA is dedicated to helping wildlife, and almost 40% of the animals helped by us are wild,’ they say.
But the point remains that the RSPCA is frequently overwhelmed by the sheer demand for its help. ‘We get more than a million calls to our emergency line each and every year, so we also ask the public to help us by taking small, sick and injured wildlife (smaller than an adult rabbit) to a vet or a local rehabilitator directly, so they can get the care they need more quickly.’
Alberto advises that working fast is vital. ‘If you find an injured bird, or a baby bird who’s fallen from their nest, keep them safe in a box with airholes and call London Wildlife Protection. It’s a network of grassroot volunteers like us who communicate through WhatsApp groups’.
Things are even worse for sickly squirrels. Doran explains that a ‘wretched bit of legislation’ means that it’s now illegal to give medical treatment to grey squirrels then re-release them into the wild, meaning that she can only rehabilitate them if she’s got room to house them permanently. ‘It’s heartbreaking,’ she says. ‘If your dog or cat was sick, you’d take them to the vet. But if squirrels get sick, they’ll only euthanise them.’
‘There is an underground rescue network, but I don’t have anything to do with them because I don’t want to go to prison,’ she explains. ‘For those who rescue them, there’s up to two years in prison and a limitless fine’. She’s currently fighting this in court: ‘Before I go the suffragette way, I’ve got to try the legal option.
Busting myths
The lack of government infrastructure protecting London’s squirrels reflects decades-old attitudes that the only wildlife worth bothering with is the quaint, endangered rural kind, like nightingales or pine martens. And that state of affairs isn’t helped by urban myths about mad, bad and dangerous London wildlife: like the iconic, headline-grabbing ‘crack squirrel’ or the fox that apparently bit a baby. Naturally, the wildlife rescuers I chatted to were desperate to correct misconceptions.
‘Every year, people die in dog attacks, and no one’s saying we should kill all the dogs,’ says Lapaz, talking about the infamous baby-biting fox. ‘The problem is that more and more people are trying to feed foxes by hand,’ she says, explaining that this familiarity erodes their caution around humans. Leave foxes to their own devices, and foxes have huge benefits: ‘they hunt a lot of rats, so if we eradicate them, London’s rodent population would go through the roof.’
How about pigeons? They’re disease-ridden flying rats, right? ‘Pigeons have a really bad reputation,’ says Alberto. ‘People say they carry a lot of diseases, but it’s very, very rare for those to be passed to humans.’
‘To catch salmonella from a pigeon, you’d need to eat its raw flesh,’ clarifies Inese.
So, obviously hosting a pigeon tartare party is a terrible idea. But what about grey squirrels? They get the worst rap of all, accused of wiping out their handsome ginger forebears. But Doran effortlessly quashes that myth.
The despised invaders of today may be the keystone species of future ecosystems
‘Red squirrels were virtually extinct before grey squirrels were introduced, because of deforestation’, she says. ‘We should celebrate the resilience of nature rather than trying to turn back the clock. Millions upon millions have been spent trying to eradicate them, and it’ll never work.’
It’s a point emphatically made by Emma Marris’s book ‘Rambunctious Garden’, which argues that instead of trying to return nature to an idyllic state that may never even have existed, we should embrace the plant and animal species manage to survive and thrive in our post-industrial, mid-climate change landscape. ‘The despised invaders of today may well be the keystone species of the future’s ecosystems,’ she writes, ‘if we give them the space to adapt and don’t rush in and tear them out.’
Mother nature’s last stand
My desire to adopt a fox is dimming. It sounds like incredibly hard work. Plus, my local fox family is reaching Succession levels of extravagance and dysfunction, feasting on messy kebabs and crushing flower pots in their intense inter-sibling tussles. I go on a gardener’s forum to get advice on how to save my plants and there’s plenty of talk about scattering the soil with cayenne pepper, garlic, cumin, tea, even lion dung from the zoo. But josusa47 has a different perspective.
‘I feel the trashing of “our” environment by wild animals is just retribution for humankind’s relentless theft of theirs,’ she says.
This year’s Chelsea Flower Show outraged many gardeners by using dandelions as part of displays, while accompanying newspaper thinkpieces urged people to let their outdoor space go wild. It’s a big shift for anyone who wants to bring the comfort and order of the indoors outside with them. But it’s probably a necessary shift if we’re going to fight climate change. 47% of London is made up of green space and blue space (lakes and rivers), and if we were a bit more open to letting it go wild, the impact would be massive.
Lapaz takes Pumpkin into primary schools where she meets local kids, and hopefully changes their mind about London’s non-human residents. She’s currently fundraising for Pumpkin's Wildlife Hospital, a medical facility and rehabilitation centre that’ll look after these maligned London residents. Turning a fox into a pet wasn’t what she planned, but it’s worked out pretty well.
‘Hopefully there’s a good reason why you came into the world, huh?’ she says, into Pumpkin’s ear, squeezing her close. Getting this close to London’s wild animals is a privilege reserved for a handful of knowledgeable, dedicated rescuers – but the city would be a better place if we all loved foxes, pigeons and squirrels as much as they did.