London Urban Legends (27 page)

As John Bryant pointed out in his ‘Hunters & Dumpers’ article in Issue 73 of the
Fortean Times
, the 1994 fox-dumping rumours emerged at the same time as Labour MP William MacNamara’s private Wild Animals (Protection) Bill was brought before the House of Commons. The bill sought to make law a six-month prison sentence for anyone inflicting unnecessary suffering on a wild animal, and ban the use of dogs to ‘kill, injure, pursue or attack’. It was an attempt to outlaw hunting. This attempt failed, but in 2004, with the Smyth and Fabricant fox-myths fuming in the background, the Labour government passed the Hunting Act, making hunting live animals with dogs illegal.

Urban Fox Hunts

As wild foxes were supposedly saved from being hunted in the countryside, their lives in London became more dangerous. The first mention of an urban fox hunt I have found is from gonzo free-sheet
Vice
in December 2003. Kid A and Kid B of Lambeth were asked why they hunted foxes, aside from the financial gain. Apparently Lambeth council charged £200 to shoot a fox but the street youth ‘only charge a tenner’. ‘Fuck it, I’m street. They shit by the swings anyway,’ said Kid A in a touching mixture of childlike indignation and lack of empathy. Their preferred method was to drug the foxes’ food, wait until the poison affected them and then beat them to death with a bat, or shoot them with a pellet gun.

It’s not all anger though; Kid A says, ‘I wanna get a fox for a pet anyway. I want to track it back to its lair, get hold of a little cub fox, innit. Take it for walks. Train it to fight.’

Is it just a story? There is blurry photo of two boys on bikes, one with a fox over his shoulder, complete with black bars across their eyes. This would need to have been faked, but such things are not difficult with a stuffed fox prop.

BBC London radio DJ and London enthusiast Robert Elms heard the urban fox-hunt story and would occasionally disappear into a reverie of Mod fox hunting conjecture, cruising London in sharp suits on scooters looking for pesky, pestilent foxes to punish. I think radio has a big influence on the dissemination of urban myths; it’s a human voice telling you a story or wondering about a curiosity that is heard by thousands of people. The content of a regular with unscripted and informal dialogue from the presenter and guests is an environment where myths can evolve, and the amount of content makes them difficult to catalogue and reference.

In August 2010, a video was released on YouTube by a group called the Urban Foxhunters, which shows them hunting down a drugged fox and killing it with a cricket bat. The group, claiming to be from around Victoria Park, hated foxes and saw killing them as a public service, describing it as ‘a bit unpleasant but it has to be done to keep our streets safe. I have kids and I don’t want them being bitten by a diseased vermin scum, what’s wrong with that?’

One member, Lone Horseman, wrote on the blog: ‘For the record – when we kill these foxes they are dosed up with Xanax, which if you haven’t tried it is a trippy anti-anxiety drug. Trust me these fuckers are dying with a smile on their face.’

If this sounds like an absurd Chris Morris-style way of baiting the media, that is because it is. It echoes closely with
Vice
’s 2003 fox hunts in Lambeth, though this could be a coincidence from both parties thinking through the logistics of catching a fox in London. Shortly after, the story appeared right across the British press. Most were appalled by the bludgeoning of a wild animal, ‘diseased vermin scum’ or not. The Metropolitan Police’s wildlife crime unit began to make enquiries, and both the Fox Project and John Bryant, who offers a ‘humane deterrence’ service for wild animals, each put forward a £1,000 reward for the identity of the group. Meanwhile in the
Evening Standard,
‘London Diary’ columnist Sebastian Shakespeare made another fox-linked political point and enthused:

Those urban fox killers are a perfect (or imperfect) example of Cameron’s Big Society in action.

Dave wants to empower communities to do things for themselves. People power, he calls it, redistributing power from the government to the man and woman on the street. ‘These are the things you do because it’s your passion,’ says the PM. Well, you can’t accuse the fox killers of lacking passion. There is no denying they are performing a public service. It is about time we learned to be big enough not to have small feelings about foxes. They are pests. And as we now know they have changed their habits and started attacking children.

The ‘Big Society’ was the plan to cover billions of pounds of cuts to local authorities for essential services by getting passionate volunteers to do them for free. So, while an expensive municipal government offers trained council workers removing foxes with snares and rifles, the Big Society produces a vigilante group with cricket bats and prescription drugs battering a poisoned wild animal to death.

It must be extremely exciting to watch your hoax take on its own life, particularly when it was designed to highlight the media. The urban fox hunting video was produced by film makers Chris Atkins and Johnny Howorth as a response to calls by newspapers and politicians to begin culling urban foxes. These calls were in response to an attack by a fox on nine-month-old twins, Isabella and Lola Koupparis, in their bedroom, near Victoria Park in Hackney. Angry about the attack, one blogger demanded ‘Bring Back Fox Hunting Now’, and the Labour government’s ban on fox hunting was never far from people’s thoughts when discussing the urban fox problem. Atkins and Howorth had already produced the film
Starsuckers
, which was another shot at British media in which they sold fake stories to newspapers about celebrities. They managed to get unverified and ridiculous stories published, including Guy Ritchie giving himself a black eye whilst drunkenly juggling with cutlery, and a friend of Amy Winehouse punching the late singer in the hair after Winehouse had accidently set it on fire. Both are very easy to check, even via a photograph, but still made it into the newspapers. A blog and Facebook group was set up for the urban fox hunters and a video was released, showing a fox being clubbed to death in Victoria Park. Once leaflets started to be distributed around Hackney seeking the ‘hunters’, and the death threats arrived online, Atkins and Howorth quickly owned up to the
Guardian
and released a making-of film of the original fox-hunting film, featuring the pair, some friends and a dog called Monty wrapped in fox fur. A stuffed fox was used at the end of the film.

Contemporary British fox legends seem inextricably linked to hunting and how people see foxes. Some people love foxes, urban and otherwise. Many years ago I shared a verdant garden in New Cross with the tenant of another flat, who had foxes queuing up for their nightly sausages. When she ran out of sausages she would feed them bread and jam. Others think of the fox as a ginger wolf, cunning enough to get into your house, vicious enough to attack your children and fearless enough to not be afraid when captured. The attacks on the Koupparis sisters and the story in February 2013 of a fox biting off one-month-old Denny Dolan’s thumb in Bromley are shocking and terrifying, but extremely rare, considering the number of foxes in London. Whatever the individual attitudes of journalists toward foxes, a newsmaker will write and print a shocking story such as urban fox attacks, and keep the story in people’s minds when foxes do less frightening things such as chewing on a pair of Ugg boots in Putney (January 2013), riding on the Circle line without a ticket (August 2012) and chewing the designer shoes of dancers in the Spiegeltent on the South Bank (September 2012). This will keep tales of fearless and ferocious foxes in the news and provide a space for people who are calling for them to be culled.

We’re going on a bear hunt.

Michael Rosen, a former Poet Laureate of Hackney

Big Cat Country

‘About 100 soldiers armed with axes and sticks joined more than 100 policemen and dogs today in a big-game hunt for a roaming leopard.’ So began a story in the
London Evening News
on 17 July 1963 after a lorry driver and motorist saw a leopard in the Shooters Hill area of south-east London. ‘I thought it was a dead dog,’ said lorry driver David Black. ‘When I got up to it, it jumped up and ran off into the wood.’ When investigating this sighting the police were surprised by the beast leaping over the bonnet of their patrol car. Trackers found a clawed tree on the south-eastern side of Shooters Hill, near Welling Way, and paw prints in the mud of a dried stream. A local estate, schoolchildren and people in Woolwich Memorial Hospital, all in the area of Oxleas Wood, were warned not to go into the woods.

On 23 July, Jim Green was awoken by loud snarling noises, starting near Kidbrooke Park Road and moving along the course of the River Quaggy. A security sergeant from a nearby RAF station also heard the snarls and investigated with a police officer, seeing ‘a big dark animal between 18 and 24 inches high silhouetted against a white cricket screen’ at dawn.

Police said they did not know of anyone local who kept wild animals, that there was no circus in the area and no one had reported an escaped animal.