Two-Legged Fox

[SimonBurchell]

Not sure where to put this, but here seems as good as anywhere for now:

'We've got a two-legged fox on the lawn' from the BBC.

A family were stunned to find a fox with just two legs in their garden.

Phil and Jane Carter, from Ilkeston in Derbyshire, often get visited by foxes and this one stayed for about 45 minutes.

Mr Carter said: "My wife shouted, 'quick, grab your phone, we've got a two-legged fox on the lawn'.

"We had about five minutes of it going around the lawn smelling and picking up some meat and then off it went like a rocket."

A spokesperson for Derbyshire Wildlife Trust said: "We've never seen anything like this in the wild before but the animal looks relatively healthy and appears to have adapted to life on two legs."

I find the video oddly disturbing for some reason, like my mind wants to see a dinosaur, but it's been overlaid with a fox.

 

[brownmane]

Imagine the sighting at night. You'd think it was all kinds of beings, never thinking it is a fox.

I can't believe it's survived like this.

 

[cycleboy2]

It's staggering that it has survived as long as this - I've seen urban foxes in Bristol that look less healthy than that.

 

[kesavaross]

It's staggering that it has survived as long as this - I've seen urban foxes in Bristol that look less healthy than that.

I think the fox is being fed. Quote from the article:

"We had about five minutes of it going around the lawn smelling and picking up some meat and then off it went like a rocket."

 

[Stillill]

It's staggering that it has survived as long as this - I've seen urban foxes in Bristol that look less healthy than that.

I wonder if this cub had some sort of human intervention as a cub. As you say it’s staggering that it has survived.

 

[SimonBurchell]

I think most wildlife refuges would put it down, saying it had no hope of survival in the wild. If it was a congenital deformity, it is possible that the mother fed it to a point that it learnt to survive, especially in a suburban environment where plenty of people put food out for the foxes.

 

[maximus otter]

I watched the video, imagining that the deformity would have been caused by either an RTA or the animal having been shot. Its appearance, however, suggests that the absence of legs is congenital. There is no evidence of even vestigial stumps, and the area where the legs should have been appears neat and symmetrical.

(I have read at least one authoritative account, and received a second face-to-face from a trusted source, of wild foxes being shot and being discovered to have had limbs surgically amputated; the operation field having been shaved and surgical stitching being present. My FTF source inferred that this had been an “urban” fox, trapped after having been injured, then treated and released in the countryside. l can’t believe that even the most wooly-minded type would kick a fox out into the wild after removing two of its legs.)

It’s amazing how Nature compensates.

maximus otter

 

[ginoide]

It's one of the eeriest videos I've ever seen. Reminds me of Hieronymus Bosch somehow.

 

[merricat]

Well there was me reading the thread title and hoping it had been spotted going about like this:

 

[Xanatic*]

If that had been seen in less than broad daylight, I think we would have had a new cryptid reported.

 

[brownmane]

My question is why can a good video of this be made, but ABC reportings are so piss poor? Hmmm.

 

[SimonBurchell]

Well there was me reading the thread title and hoping it had been spotted going about like this:

View attachment 63090

This reminds me of a high strangeness account in Graham McEwan's excellent book Mystery Animals of Britain and Ireland... I'll have to dig it out and post it here, it gave me the creeps!

 

[Sharon Hill]

If that had been seen in less than broad daylight, I think we would have had a new cryptid reported.

But consider the actual explanation - a functional two legged fox. An anomaly but not that weird of an explanation. When skeptics suggest that cryptid sightings could be bears walking on two legs, a decomposing carcass, or animals with severe mange - anomalies but nothing that weird - those explanations are often ridiculed or ignored for more exotic and unreasonable ones.

I think this case is a vindication of prosaic (relatively) explanations for strange animal sightings. They have explanations that don't involve creating new species or supernatural entities.

 

[SimonBurchell]

Well there was me reading the thread title and hoping it had been spotted going about like this:

View attachment 63090

This reminds me of a high strangeness account in Graham McEwan's excellent book Mystery Animals of Britain and Ireland... I'll have to dig it out and post it here, it gave me the creeps!

Okay, here we go, from Mystery Animals of Britain and Ireland by Graham J. McEwan, published in 1986, pp. 174-175:

The Vulpine Visitor
[...] described by Richard Curle in his book Caravansary and Conversation published in 1937. He encountered the beast when a boy in Scotland. He was lying awake in his bed at about 2.00 one winter's morning, when he heard footsteps approaching the house. They paused momentarily by the back door, then the boy heard them inside the house, first on the flagstones of the lower passage, then coming up the stairs and approaching his room. Curle continues:

By this time I was sitting up in bed with my eyes glued to the door and with horror in my heart. The handle turned and in the opening stood a creature with the face of a fox, which walked on its hind legs. It was dressed in some sort of way and, would you credit it, wore a top hat, which added an indescribably macabre touch. But its face, I repeat, was fox-like and it had a bushy tail. It was, perhaps, bigger than a real fox, but it was vulpine through and through, although I admit that it had no rank odour.

It gazed at me with a fixed rather than a malign expression, but it did not speak. I shouted out, 'Go away!' - how well I remember the exact words! - and it turned round and went away. I heard its steps follow, in retreat, the precise route they had followed before, unhurried and steady as ever, until at last they died out on the road leading to the woods.

Several explanations have been offered. One is that it was a dream within a dream and that I was asleep the whole time; well, all I can do is to reiterate, emphatically, that I was wide awake. This may not sound convincing, but if one does not know when one is wide awake, what does one know? Of course, I may, for the first and last time, have been subject to an hallucination but, if so, then it was a remarkably thorough one. Still another explanation is that it was a hoax; but who on earth, even if in his dwarfish dimensions he were able to disguise himself as a fox, could make his legs shrink?

The thing seems inexplicable to me, who have pondered it for over forty years.