RSPCA issues advice after video of woman feeding hungry foxes goes viral

The RSPCA has warned people to be careful when feeding foxes after a video of a Scottish woman tossing food to a family of the animals outside her door went viral.

The video was posted on TikTok by Sharon Hughes in September this year. It shows Hughes, whose account has multiple videos of her feeding foxes, giving the animals chicken wings half a dozen yards from her back door. They grab the food and scurry off.

The post has subsequently been re-shared on TikTok and X (formerly known as Twitter), where it has gone viral in recent weeks - the X post alone has been viewed nearly 14 million times.

Hughes, 56, who is based in East Kilbride, initially went viral in the summer when similar videos to the current post were widely shared. She told the Sunday Mail at the time she had been feeding the same family of foxes for 25 years.

“We are now on the fourth generation of foxes. I remember feeding their great-grandparents. I began posting videos of the foxes being fed a few years ago and I now get messages from all over the world. The foxes now have 140,000 followers combined between my Instagram and TikTok accounts. There have been more than 90million views and over 10million likes on my posts.”

Her videos are typically the same: come rain or shine, the hungry foxes appear at her garden door, and Hughes greets them with food such as homemade sausages and leftover Chinese food. The viral post on X has been greeted affectionately by many users, while others have wondered how safe it can be to interact with the wild animals in such as way.

In a statement to Yahoo News, a spokesperson for the RSPCA ‘urged’ people to ‘be cautious’ in response to the video and not to tame or hand-feed foxes.

A spokesperson said: “It is always wonderful to see foxes in the wild. If you decide to leave food out for foxes, we would urge people to be cautious and never try to make them tame or hand-feed them. We also encourage people to not put out too much food, as foxes won’t move far if they can find all the food they need in one place. Foxes are excellent scavengers, and will usually already have a good food supply in the area.

“Foxes and other wildlife shouldn’t be kept as pets because they are wild animals and their needs are very specific so this lucky person should continue enjoying watching these visitors in the wild.”

Hughes told Yahoo News she started feeding the foxes to ensure they wouldn't harm her own pet cats: "We moved here 26 years ago and realised there were foxes around. I was worried about my cats so I spoke to the vet. He assured me that foxes avoid cats as a cat can cause them serious damage.

"He also told me that only a starving fox would attempt a cat because of this. That's when I decided the foxes would never be starving and now - 26 years and a good few generations later - they still get fed."

She said she's not too sure why people enjoy her videos so much. Hughes added: "Maybe because the fox is usually portrayed as a fearsome, aggressive sly creature, and people can actually see how quiet and family-orientated they are and how they all have different personalities."

Domesticated foxes?

Two weeks ago, another video showing a fox on a seat in a London bus went viral. In the post on X, the user captioned the video of the fox on the back of a bus, “WHAT ?!” led to 5.9 million views, and the upload on TikTok has 4 million views.

The viral videos have both led to people discussing whether foxes could eventually be domesticated as pets.

Indeed, a study from 2020 suggested urban red foxes could be becoming more similar to domesticated dogs. In the study, the University of Glasgow’s Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine, investigated the differences between urban and rural red foxes in the UK.

The study found urban foxes in the UK have a smaller brain size capacity than their rural counterparts with a different snout shape also helping forage for food in urban surroundings.

Dr Kevin Parsons, who led the study team, said: “We wondered whether this change in lifestyle was related to adaptive differences between urban and rural populations of red foxes.

“We assessed skulls from hundreds of foxes found within London and the surrounding countryside, and saw that urban foxes had a smaller brain size capacity but also a different snout shape that would help them forage within urban habitats. This could tell us whether the evolution of urban/rural differences was completely unique or something that has potentially happened previously.

“It turned out that the way urban and rural foxes differed matched up with a pattern of fox evolution that has occurred over millions of years between species. While the amount of change isn’t as big, this showed that this recent evolutionary change in foxes is dependent upon deep-seated tendencies for how foxes can change.

“In other words, these changes were not caused by random mutations having random effects the way many might think evolution occurs.”

Recommended reading:

• Exotic fox spotted roaming streets of British town (The Telegraph)

• Fox-hunting row: playing politics with animal welfare (The Conversation)