Tame foxes and swimming horses in West Cork

A tame fox is an unusual sight for those of us who have lived their lives in the country. Foxes are mostly nocturnal and are shy of humans, their main enemy, but recently I came across two foxes on separate occasions who regularly visited people for a evening snack and one who was trained to take food from a human’s hand.

Both of these animals were in West Cork. When we arrived at a holiday house we were renting two summers ago, there was a note in the visitors’ book which marvelled at the routine visit by a local fox at dusk every night which would hang around the barbecue and eat food from the English visitors’ hands. Impossible, I thought as I read this, it must have been a dog that looked like a fox.

Tamed by a local German
How wrong I was! Two nights later we were sitting at the kitchen window admiring the sunset when one of the children shouted in excitement. A fox was standing in the shadow of the trees as it watched the house. Grabbing pieces of bread, we hurried to the doorstep and sat down to wait. Sure enough, the fox cautiously approached and very gently took the bread from our fingers. This was the beginning of our holiday relationship with this little vixen.

She looked in very good condition and, when we made enquires, we were told that she had been tamed as a cub by a local German who travelled abroad a lot and didn’t think it fair to have a dog. He wormed and deloused the fox regularly so she had a beautiful healthy coat and bushy tail. When the German went away, the fox trotted off to see what other inhabitants of the area had to offer in the line of food. (See video in right hand column on this page).

Fox visits B & B
The other tame fox visited a B & B in West Cork every evening and was fed dog biscuits by the owner. She thought it was a male until one night the fox appeared with two cubs in tow. We saw the fox and fed her – something that delighted a young French student who had come to us to ride horses and learn English. He had never seen a fox before.

Sea bathing for horses
Swimming horses is a well known way of improving fitness and providing exercise after injury. It’s not possible, however, for many horse owners unless we take them to a special horse pool which obviously can work out expensive. In West Cork I witnessed horses swimming in the sea from a gently sloping beach in a calm inlet. The horses were ‘lead’ wearing a headcollar and rope behind a motor boat and had to swim quite a distance out from the beach before turning to come back. I remember being impressed by the shine on their coats and how fit they looked (they were trotters) but I was concerned that if anything went wrong, such as a horse swallowing too much water, he was a long way from the shore. If it had been my horse, I would have asked him to swim parallel with the beach rather than out to sea – advice that is often given to human swimmers.

The horses looked like they enjoyed the experience and, from the trainer’s point of view, it was a free way to exercise them with the added benefit of salt water which would help heal any cuts.