Practical Advice - Urban Foxes

Another reason for foxes being attracted to your garden is that it can provide a safe place to shelter by day or night. This may be an overgrown or neglected area or a void beneath a building. Voids can be protected using heavy duty mesh (Weld Mesh). Mesh with holes measuring 2" (50 mm) square is ideal, making sure that it is securely fixed to any building and buried to a depth of 12" (30 cm) into the soil to prevent the fox burrowing under the mesh.

If you decide that the presence of foxes in your garden is genuinely unacceptable, then there are ways of discouraging them, although none are fool-proof.

To prevent foxes using your garden, you can try a suitable proprietary animal repellent. A range of products are available from Garden Centres, Hardware and D-I-Y stores but please note only approved products can be used and they must be used in accordance with the manufacturer's instructions. The use of non-approved products such as creosote and diesel oil is not permitted by law. The use of these types of non-approved products can be very dangerous to other pets such as cats and dogs. Prosecutions can result against anyone who is found using such products.

Your local Garden Centre, Hardware or D-I-Y store should be able to provide you with the correct advice on the most suitable product to use.

Two repellent products that are approved for use against foxes are:

1. Renardine, based on bone oil.
2. Scoot, containing aluminium ammonium sulphate.

Alternatively you can purchase a scent neutraliser called CAT OFF. This product reduces and neutralises the scents left behind by the fox from its faeces or urine.

Any chemical used as a repellent is covered under The Control of Pesticide Regulations 1986, where it states that only approved chemicals may be used.

All chemicals must be used safely and in accordance with the manufacturers recommendations.

Sometimes fox cubs may be living in an adjacent property, but playing in your garden, trampling, flower beds, stealing washing off lines, jumping on and breaking cloches, or getting entangled in garden netting. Invariably the cubs play very close to their earth, and so they will be living a few metres away, under a neighbour's shed or in a patch of rank vegetation.

If they are living in a neighbour's garden, you can ask your neighbour to encourage the foxes to move on. But if your neighbour welcomes the foxes, there is little that you can do, since anyone is perfectly at liberty to encourage foxes to live in their garden. All you can do is try to block the access points to your garden so that the cubs play elsewhere.

Sometimes, particularly in late summer, the cubs are coming from a patch of dense vegetation (often brambles) in an adjacent allotment or an overgrown garden. To get the foxes to move, all that has to be done is to clear the area in which they are living.