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If a Fox Could Speak
Paperback
Series: If They Could Speak, Book 9
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 14 2025
Pages: 74
Weight: 0.24
Height: 0.15 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
She is a red fox, she lives under the shed at the bottom of a south London garden with her four cubs, and she has decided it is time you heard her side of the story.
She explains why she leaps into the air to catch a mouse, and why scientists in the Czech Republic found that foxes pouncing in a roughly northward direction catch far more of their prey. She translates the screams that wake you in January, tells how foxes moved into British cities in the 1930s, and reveals what a 2021 study found about the bold fox at your back door. She remembers Romeo, the fox who lived near the top of the Shard while it was being built.
She tells the story of the Siberian foxes who learned to wag their tails: the experiment that Dmitry Belyayev and Lyudmila Trut ran for decades, and what it taught us about how wolves became dogs. She introduces her cousins, from the Arctic fox that walked from Norway to Canada to the fennec with its enormous ears and the little Chilean fox that Charles Darwin hit on the head with a hammer.
Then come the stories people tell. Aesop's sour grapes, the little foxes of the Song of Solomon, Reynard the trickster, Chaucer's sly fox and Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox. In Japan she becomes the kitsune, the shapeshifter with nine tails, the fox wife and the white messenger of Inari, and in China and Korea the nine-tailed fox spirit. Finally she tells the long, bitter history of fox hunting in Britain, from Edward I's royal foxhounds to the Hunting Act of 2004, and what really happened to fox numbers when the hunting stopped.
Funny, sharp and carefully researched, this book checks every fact and every quotation against real sources, and a closing section sets out what we know, what we don't, and the popular beliefs about foxes that turn out to be wrong.
If a Fox Could Speak is for curious readers of every age, and for anyone who has ever looked out of the window at night and seen a fox looking back.
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