Google outfoxed by crafty squatters in $1B London HQ's rooftop garden Over a billion dollars, a renowned architect, and more than a decade under construction haven't prevented Google being beaten to its new London digs by unexpected tenants – urban foxes. First announced in 2013, the Thomas Heatherwick-designed King's Cross "landscraper" – as long as the Shard is tall (310 meters) – had its last …
Pest control experts suggest the new kings of King's Cross could be living off rats.
And the population will explode when the google tenants arrive because the food stock becomes effectively infinite. Therefore, we should do some very effective pest control and not allow any google tenants to enter the building, ever.
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https://www.gov.uk/guidance/foxes-moles-and-mink-how-to-protect-your-property-from-damage#foxes
Foxes
Foxes are not protected for conservation purposes in England. The owner or occupier of the property where a problem with foxes occurs can decide when to control them. You or anyone you employ to control the foxes must protect their welfare.
To discourage foxes from coming to your property you should:
secure food waste in bins
use fencing to protect pets and livestock from foxes
If the problem continues you can use the control methods set out in this guide. You must not:
use gassing or poisoning
block or destroy fox earths if they are occupied
use dogs to hunt foxes
>” You must not:
use dogs to hunt foxes”
Depends on your definition of hunting…
I cleared the foxes out of my area by simply letting the dogs out the back door, and left them to it…
As the roof top counts as a garden, doubt you could call “letting the dogs out to satisfy a call of nature” hunting…
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/foxes-moles-and-mink-how-to-protect-your-property-from-damage#foxes
Interesting document. The up front illegal methods include bows and crossbows which in the UK is probably redolent of prancing nutters rather than serious bow hunters and explosives which is a bit Wiley Coyote cartoonish and incidentally seems to preclude the use of orbital nuclear weapons.
Several mentions of humanely euthanasing foxes you've trapped but no mention of methods. I definitely would not want to try and inject a lethal barbiturate into a seriously pissed off fox with a deluxe set of teeth and a jaw that crushes bone. I suppose the use of a firearm is implied.
We have the blighters in (except Tas.) thanks to the English aristocracy sending its defective spawn to the colonies where they, missing fox hunting, imported the pests into AU where they have decimated native wildlife ever since.
From experience foxes aren't small furry animals with cute bushy tails; they are large and potentially dangerous predators. We aren't so particular about how they are dispatched - 1080 poison is still used to control fox and feral dog populations.
No, foxes - adding any apostrophe is illiterate.
Foxes are classed as vermin so definitely not protected. You may be confusing them with badgers which are protected.
Hunting foxes with dogs is not longer permitted (rightly IMHO) but shooting them is encouraged in the countryside as they can be a major nuisance.
It all depends on the kind of gun and the type of ammunition. You don't need a .223 magnum semiauto to deal with small animals
It's a good idea to use a suppressor in urban areas (pest control with guns happens a LOT in cities) and many operators use air/gas rifles with subsonic muzzle velocities to avoid drawng unwanted attention
Austria has had its first mass shooting in almost a decade, the previous being 3 dead and 11 injured in 2016, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nenzing_shooting
USA has them (if defined as 4 or more people in one event) on average every day, see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-41488081
> And how many people live in Austria.
> 9.132 million (2023)
> We have cities bigger than that so your comparison is a crock of shit.
New York is the largest US city with a population of 8.4m. So, no, you don't have a city that is more populous than Austria. But New York does beat the whole of Austria for gun homicides though.
Clearly you have some difficulties in comprehending statistics, perhaps even numbers themselves. Allow me to explain for the hard of thinking:
Austria mass shootings in 10 years = 3 (more or less), so per 1M people per year = 0.033
USA mass shootings in 10 years = 4900 (also very roughly), per 1M people per year = 1.49
USA/Austria ratio = 45 (sufficient accuracy for this debate).
Hitler was Australian
An interesting alternative history. AU certainly had a lot of German settlers but most were trying to put as much distance as possible between them and the Kaiser's Germany for a variety of religious and political reasons. (Pre 1914)
I might imagine Adolf being a bit more of a success as an artist in the colonies and ending up working on Smiths Weekly or The Bulletin, gallivanting about, and consuming prodigious quantities of Australian beer, with Norman Lindsay and the rest of that Bohemian push.
If foxes prey on weasels they won't starve even if they did manage to polish off the chocolate factory manglement there isn't a great hike to Whitehall. ;)
Technically Austrian soil, therefore Austria is in the USA.
Just your afternoon pedant, making his rounds.
Embassies aren't the soil of their owning countries. They're just legally protected (Vienna Conventions - or their expression in national law) property, belonging to a foreign government. While it's an embassy, the country's government can't enter it without permission of the owning government or ambassador. However the embassy may only be used for "diplomatic purposes".
Guns aren't banned in the UK. Apparently we have 4.6 firearms per 100 people.
There's an almost-complete ban on handguns- that came in after a school shooting. Things like really long barreled revolvers and muzzle-loading ones get round the rules but are rare.
Shotguns are pretty common
Rifles are used for sport, hunting, etc.
If you've got a legitimate need for a firearm, actually do some training, stick to some safety rules, and are not banned from owning one then there are plenty of options for legal guns in the UK. A lot of Europe is more lenient.
I had a gun license and a collection when I was in the UK, and when the ban was announced I did what every reasonable citizen did: I handed them in.
At the time I had no need for guns for personal protection, it was simply interest and a bit of sport, and I don't need a gun to prove whatever gun possession appears to do to some people.
The only challenge I have is when I fly from the UK as I still know some range masters and may thus end up with detectable GSR :).
A shotgun is a tool of the countryside and is equipment for popular sporting pastimes such as clay shooting.
You may own a shotgun if you have a valid reason (such as above) can show you are not a nutcase, prove you have secure storage for it and you must renew the licence every three years. This renewal will probably involve a home visit by a police firearms officer and interview.
I thought guns were banned across the UK.
A common misconception held by Americans, because your [Fox?] news tells you that they are banned in the UK.
The actual situation is that you just need to apply for a license from the local police. This will be accepted pretty much automatically as long as you don't have a criminal record, and a flag gets put on your medical records to tell the police if you suffer relevant medical complications that might affect the safety of the public. Ie; get diagnosed as having schizophrenia or similar and your firearms are going to sit in the safe at the police station while your under treatment for the safety of the public.
Once you have a license if you have a good reason for having something then there are probably fewer restrictions than there are in much of the US. For instance we've got clubs that shoot full automatic belt fed machine guns which are banned across large swathes of the US.
The UK ban on handguns applies to keeping them at home, etc, as I believe you can shoot them at a gun club but they are held under lock & key there.
We still have murder taking place and illegal guns are used in a portion of them (typically drug gang feuds), though only around 4% overall of homicides involve guns. The country-wide average murder rate of 1.148 per 100k per year it is still much lower than the USA at 5.763
They can be a major nuisance in urban areas too
I've seen them take cats and the foxes around here have ranged in size up to an Alsatian dog before the pest controllers dealt with them
It doesn't help that idiots feed them, which causes them to lose their fear of hoomans and then become a bigger nuisance. It should be illegal but isn't.
"I've seen them take cats and the foxes around here have ranged in size up to an Alsatian dog before the pest controllers dealt with them”
Where is that, because where I live (SE London outskirts), most of the foxes I see look as if they could be taken out by a large rat, skinny looking things, I tend to stare them out, then look away to give them the opportunity to leg it.
The cat thing has been going around for some time, yes, I’m sure that occasionally a fox may well take down a cat, but it probably won’t be through choice. An adult cat is not far off the mass of a fox, and are also apex-predators. Think of it from the fox’s perspective, ‘I probably will be able to take this mammal down, but they are well armed, and I will almost certainly be injured in the encounter - and if I am injured and can’t hunt or scavenge, then I'm going to die; so maybe the best option is to leave the cat alone’.
There are many more urban foxes in comparison to the countryside - mainly due to the waste food that abounds in urban areas, and Farmers have no incentive to keep the population artificially high now hunting is banned.
Going back to the end of the last century my uncle was a Game Keeper about 20 miles from a city with a bombed out Cathedral.
The city Pest Controllers used to dump any urban foxes they caught in the countryside near my uncle and the local Game Keepers shot them rather than let them starve - a much more humane end. (They were easy to spot as they didn't run when "lamped", but the Keepers did find the occasional starved one.)
The Game Keepers wrote multiple times to the City Council and their Pest Controllers to get this stopped, but with no reply.
In the end they turned up at a Council meeting with a bill for the bullets!
One assumes that the Pest Controllers starting dumping the Foxes elsewhere, or hopefully humanely disposed of them.
Some years back I quickly learnt the hard way what happens when you don't secure your food waste properly in London. In short your local neighbourhood fox would find said waste, throw it all over your garden and if it didn't find anything it liked would then take a dump in the middle of your path.
... a lot of times it's actually squirrels. Seen it personally.
Lived at the top of an iron staircase to my front door. Put out a couple of black bags to take down to bin when I next went out.
Hot summer so front door open, me sitting ten foot away.
Heard sound of tearing and encountered what looked like a whole colony of tree-rats tearing them apart!
Foxes have a strong, pungent smell (even where they have only run through foliage, I can smell them), although it seems that a lot of people can't smell it! (It's why Fox Hunts used multiple dogs as it quickly overpowered their olfactory prowess.)
Your other options would be Cats - that do both the spreading and mess.
And urban Badgers are surprisingly common - but they are very particular about their toilet habits.
Their "Master Stoat" (coffee stout) is very nice, but the relatively new Red Rascal is particularly apposite for this topic and also very nice.
"Sneaking through the fading light and growing shadows, a flash of red is all that might give this Rascal away as he pilfers ripe red cherries from the orchard.
Forever on the quest for new flavours this cunning hunter always knows where to find the juiciest morsels.
Mushrooms: I try to like them, but really they don't add much to the world, and usually go slimey in the fridge before they get used*.
Snakes: Last snake I saw was a red-bellied black (holiday in Oz), treat with respect; Before that an adder on Beachy Head (treat with almost as much respect).
* Like other Rubbish Foods, such as lettuce, celery, or radishes
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The other problem with urbane foxes is all the pointed witticisms about how you've not kept your garden looking nice and should really move to a more fashionable part of town. And the food, dear boy, the food! Could you not try just a little harder? Oh dear. This isn't the 1970s you know...
"In short your local neighbourhood fox would find said waste, throw it all over your garden and if it didn't find anything it liked would then take a dump in the middle of your path.”
Honestly I’ve seen crows do that, well other than taking a dump in the middle of your path, possibly on your car.....
Expect that's the average in the wild. Lot of predators like cars, wolves, coyotes, mountains lions, jaguars depending where the live. over there it's probably wild cars that cause most of the deaths. see a lot of bobcats around here, but probably too small to be a real threat to a fox.
Not hard to spin "We've got a family of foxes living with us" as positive coverage.
Which, unless you're a complete a-hole, actually *is* positive. They're shy but ultimately friendly creatures.
Get a vet in to consult and build them a habitat.
It'd probably go viral.
By the way, a lot of stuff blamed on foxes - like rummaging through bins - is actually tree-rats (aka squirrels).
Ghey should just go with the flow.
There's multiple solutions available;
revoke their lift access when they are out and about.
introduce fines for non-compliance of organic waste disposal; foxes don't have money so will be obliged to move on.
Put inari-sushi on the cafeteria menu; foxes will fear that they will be eaten and will flee.
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