Animal Friends .. Fox and Hound - Page 1

I had a female red fox that was friends with my Great Pyrenees.  When I was training and playing with my GSD ( throwing ball etc. ) she would come and sit outside the chain link fence and watch us play .. pretty sure she wanted to join in.  The female fox had a den in the corner of my two acre yard and the Great Pyrenees was her security guard .. she could sleep safe at night because the Great Pyrenees was guarding her sheep and her fox.

Photoshop?

I know for a fact my fox and Great Pyrenees were not photoshopped.  Links to two separate fox and dog best friends.  Also remember that the Russian experiments with Siberian foxes created domesticated versions in as few as three generations by picking those with less fear and/or aggression toward humans.

http://animalmozo.com/2016/05/23/look-at-the-story-of-these-two-unlikely-friends/?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=unlikelyfriends6

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jv3nRkPGrOY

https://www.buzzfeed.com/summeranne/real-life-fox-and-the-hound-best-friends-will-melt-your-hear?utm_term=.jl853O3EL#.axRp797Pr

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN0ORyDfExE

I had a fox puppy a friend of mine saved from a trap. I raised it in the barn in a big wire crate, picking up road kills to feed it. It was a little female, cutest thing I ever saw. She sounded like a Pomeranian barking when she heard me come out of the house in the morning. I'd bark back to her and we'd have a conversation back and forth. I'd let her out and take her for walks, at night I'd put her in the crate. When she got big enough to turn her loose I brought my Irish terrier in the stall with the fox in the crate. My dog went up sniffing and checking her out, the fox freaked out. That night I left the crate open, the stall door open and next morning she was gone.
But for about a year, she would bark to me from the woods evenings and early morning, I'd bark back to her. I never let her habituate to my dogs, and her instincts kicked in when I brought my terrier into the stall.
Interestingly,seems like she made the connection with me and my dog, because she was scared of me after I brought my terrier in. So two things were accomplished...instinctual fear of people and of dogs activated.

Well done .. keeping a fox safe from dogs is difficult but keeping a domesticated fox safe from humans would be a nightmare. Foxes belong in the wild and they are on the come back in less dense urban areas with strip malls and grassy roadsides and medians due to the mouse and rat populations that humans allow to blossom. That said there have been many cases of foxes and wolves living in close proximity to human and dogs ( Romeo the wolf etc. ) peacefully. Increasingly it is less than certain whether humans domesticated grey wolves or grey wolves domesticated humans. There are certainly a lot of humans that can't get along with dogs, foxes, or wolves so it seems the domestication of humans is a work in progress.