No offence taken.FlawedGenius wrote:No offence, mate, but you're being a bit naive.
Before us humans "turned up" the amount of available prey (as you say) is what regulated the fox population. This is still the case now.
What you seemingly fail to realise is that "available prey" does not just constitute living things. Like rats, foxes will eat almost anything available - although their preferance is meat.
These days, mainly because of household and commercial food waste - aswell as farmed fur and feather - there are an infinate number of the easy meals you mention available to foxes.
Saying that the fox population should not be controlled is exactly the same as saying the rat population should not be controlled.
As I did say, foxes are scavengers. I merely used chickens as an example, but of course it's an example that could be applied to almost everything in the fox’s diet. If people didn't give them an easy meal, then there would be no problems. Often it's the very people complaining loudest that are inadvertently feeding their local fox.
Comparing the need to control the fox population with the need to control the rat population is madness. What, in effect, you're saying is that, without regulation, the fox population will grow to epic proportions, and we'll be overrun by the things. There can be no reasonable comparison between the two, what we’re taking about is the fox population rising by, at the very most, a few thousand over an extended period of time. It’s hardly the same thing as the rat population rising by millions in a year.
And no amount of argument is going to change the fact that hunting with dogs is fundamentally wrong. It’s only a marginal step down from bear-baiting. Maybe you’re right and foxes do need to be controlled (i for one think you're wrong), but if that is the case then there are much more humane ways of doing it than setting dogs on the animal. I don’t see how anyone with a conscience could condone an animal that in its own eyes has done no wrong, being torn apart for sport.