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THIS LADY who is best friends with her local community of foxes has lifted the lid on the secret lives of her wily neighbours to her tens of thousands of online fans.
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Fantastic Mrs Fox UK
**EXCLUSIVE**
By Shannine O’Neill
THIS LADY who is best friends with her local community of foxes has lifted the lid on the secret lives of her wily neighbours to her tens of thousands of online fans.
Author Lucy Goacher (32) from Worthing, UK has beaten the stigma surrounding foxes that imply they are vicious and dangerous as she has nightly visitors from friendly foxes and has even nursed a mange-infested fox back to health.
Lucy started noticing foxes becoming a regular fixture around her home around 2016 after she had noticed a few wild foxes darting across their garden in the past and decided to give them a helping hand by throwing out some leftover meat from their barbeque they had that day.
Soon enough, a fox family consisting of a dominant male and three vixens began visiting on a regular basis.
Lucy would leave out scraps of leftover meat that she had for the foxes, who in time saw it as their regular dining spot every night.
Slowly but surely, Lucy’s fox-filled diner became a hit with the local foxes with quite a few fox families coming to visit over time.
Lucy started to bond with the foxes and name them by using the distinguishing differences she could see, which included ‘The Boy One’, ‘Tappy’, ‘The Shy One’, ‘Limpy’, ‘Fifth Fox’, ‘Bruiser’, ‘Tiny Tail’, ‘Valentine’, Belle, ‘Miss P’, and Tiny Tail’s
new cubs ‘Boo-Boo’, ‘Georgie’, and ‘Vesper’.
Ever since Lucy had started posting about her fox adventures on her Instagram page,
@goachwriter, she has grown an audience of 34.5K followers, all loving the relationship between Lucy and her fox visitors.
One fox in particular has stolen Lucy’s heart called ‘Miss.P’, short for ‘Miss. Poorly’ as she came to Lucy while suffering from a bad case of Mange in September 2020.
Mange is a skin parasite that foxes can get that causes itching, pain and fur loss.
Miss.P had ghastly open wounds and cuts across her back and tail, had chunks of fur missing, was very skinny and refused to eat when she first came to Lucy’s garden.
Despite her sorry state, Miss.P kept returning to Lucy’s home for what Lucy believed was in search of help and refuge, as unlike the other foxes who had returned, Miss.P was much more approachable and trusting, even in time coming up to Lucy when the door was open.
When Lucy saw the sad state Miss.P was in, she devoted her time to healing her by throwing her food into the garden laced with Mange medicine, which quickly killed the mites and began her healing process.
Over time, Miss.P started to grow her fur back and became more and more approachable with Lucy, even sleeping by her door while Lucy wrote her debut novel, The Edge, while sitting in her armchair watching Miss.P.
“The foxes became regular visitors around 2016. Before then, I’d only see them very rarely: skinny, scared, and running at top speed down the garden to leap over the back wall,” she said.
“We started off with a single fox family, which was a dominant male and his three vixens.
“To the untrained eye, all foxes look very alike. I used to refer to the foxes by the way I could tell them apart, and the names stuck.
“So we had our brave, courageous, and very greedy male who I called ‘The Boy One’, ‘Tappy’, who tapped on the patio door to ask for food, ‘Limpy’, who was always hobbling, and ‘The Shy One’, who was beautiful but took months to pluck up the courage to come closer.
“The Boy One’s family stayed for years, bringing two different sets of cubs to visit, until a new family – run by Bruiser, a hulking oaf of a fox – took over the territory in 2022.”
The new group, run by Bruiser, followed Miss P to Lucy’s garden and eventually took over, giving Lucy a whole new family of foxes to get to know.
“This new family is comprised of Bruiser, dominant female Tiny Tail, who has always had a very cute stubby tail, subordinate female Belle, who is beautiful and sounds like a squeaky dog toy, and also Valentine, who hasn’t visited in a while, but went viral on Instagram for his habit of standing on his hind legs to stretch against the window,” she said.
“We also have Tiny Tail and Bruiser’s three cubs, who are getting bigger and more confident every day.
“Miss P – short for Miss Poorly – bridged the two groups, muscling her way into The Boy One’s group for feeding time, and apparently bringing her own family over to discover the nightly dinners, too.
“Although one can never be too sure about fox family trees, I’m pretty sure she and Tiny Tail are related, so perhaps sisters, or Tiny Tail is Miss P’s mother.”
Miss P never seemed to fit in with ‘The Boy One’s’ group, as she was picked on mercilessly by the other foxes and was even bitten and nipped at, but she seems much happier now that her own family is around to protect her. But unfortunately Miss P is still at risk from mange, picking up a few further outbreaks in the years since her first illness. Lucy believes Miss P finds it much harder to shake off the parasite than most foxes, so she keeps mange medicine and healing manuka honey close by for her.
“Although Miss P first visited one night in November 2019, I didn’t see her again until late September 2020, when she became a regular visitor,” she said.
“I could tell immediately that she was suffering from mange, a horrible skin parasite that causes pain, itchiness, and fur loss in foxes.
“She had wounds across her back and tail, chunks of fur were missing, and she generally seemed sad and vulnerable.
“She was also very skinny, but didn’t want to eat.
“Luckily I had a prescription-only flea medication for my cat that I could use by putting into Miss P’s food, and it worked a treat: the mange parasites were killed, she stopped scratching herself, and her skin had time to heal.”
Although foxes have a negative representation and would assume they are aggressive, Lucy has found the opposite is true as her cat Libby is much more unaccepting of the foxes than they are of Libby.
“Some people claim foxes are a danger to cats, but this hasn’t been my experience at all,” she said.
“In fact, mostly it’s been my cats who try to attack the foxes, and the foxes are the poor victims who have to run away.
“My cat, Libby, is very jealous of Miss P’s nightly chicken dinners, and often scoops out a few servings for herself during dinnertime.
“Libby often sits outside on the patio step, causing trouble – chasing the foxes, hitting the foxes, hissing.
“Any drama between fox and cat is 100% the fault of the cat, mostly Miss P just wants to eat her dinner in peace, and her scared, flattened ears whenever Libby is around show just who the boss of the garden is.”
Lucy continued to treat Miss.P with her medication, and even after that proceeded with feeding her healthy and nutritious-dense food such as raw chicken and eggs.
“I made sure to give her fresh, healthy food like raw chicken, livers, and eggs to help build her strength back up, although she didn’t always want to eat these delicacies,” she said.
“At one point, the only thing she’d eat was scotch eggs! I had to go out every day during lockdown to get her more.
“While her main diet is protein-based, she’d always been a fan of snack foods like
medicinal manuka honey, jam sandwiches, and dog-safe chocolate.
“And as long as she was eating, I didn’t mind.”
Now, Lucy has bonded the most with Miss.P and regularly posts content for her followers on Instagram, with reels of Miss.P consistently reaching over seven-thousand views each.
“Miss P is ‘my’ fox,” she said.
“When she first arrived with mange, she was in new territory controlled by foxes who didn’t like her at all, and she had no reason to stick around.
“It was as though she somehow knew that this was the place to come, and she showed extraordinary trust in me very quickly.
“What started as me throwing her sandwiches with mange treatment turned within weeks into her taking things from my hand, and her letting me sit by the open door as she ate – something my previous foxes never tolerated, even after four years of feeding them.”
Lucy has shown her followers how docile and friendly Miss.P can be, often showing reels of Lucy ‘booping’ Miss.P’s nose.
“Now, almost three years into knowing each other, Miss P feels completely at home,” she said.
“I boop her on the nose every night, she stands up and scratches on the door if I’m taking too long to get her dinner ready (too long to Miss P means
over five seconds, usually), and I’ve even managed a very quick stroke of her ears.
“She’s a sweet, gentle girl with a bit of sass, like when she grumbles at the other foxes getting attention, or when she glares at me for not giving her enough treats.
“The others are not so sure, and will generally back away if I stand up or open the door.
“However, most can be lured closer with the promise of treats.”
Lucy has now been known by her Instagram followers and even friends and family as the ‘fox girl’ because of her new-found love of the animal.
“Most people find it very unusual, but as anyone who follows the foxes’ antics on Instagram knows, they are gentle, playful, funny animals, and building up this kind of trust with them isn’t something that happens overnight,” she said.
“I enjoy people visiting, as their shock when Miss P scratches on the window for food, or when she takes a jam sandwich from my hand, reminds me just how special it is.
“My family also love that I’m a ‘fox girl’ as it makes me very easy to buy for.
“I haven’t had a non-fox-related Christmas gift in years.”
Lucy loves that she has been able to show another side to foxes on her Instagram, especially since foxes have such a bad reputation.
“People assume foxes are vicious, mean, dangerous – and before I had fox visitors of my own, I probably would have thought the same,” she said.
“In reality, they’re kind, gentle creatures who live a very hard life on our streets, and I see no
harm in making life a little bit easier for them, one tin of dog food at a time.
“If foxes had been lucky enough to be domesticated a few thousand years ago, everyone could have their own Miss P curled up on their lap every evening.
“But instead foxes are hunted in the countryside and villainised in the cities, and remain the misunderstood animals who share our gardens with us once the sun goes down.”
ENDS
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