Ways to Get Rid of Foxes

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One of the easiest ways to keep foxes away from your property is to use a fence. This physical barrier will add just that — a physical obstacle — that it must overcome. At the same time, if the garden behind the fence doesn't have something to offer, trying to get around the fence will be pointless. If you take away everything that the fox is looking for, alongside having a fence, you will be on your way to being protected from a foxy invasion.



Of course, foxes can not only jump, they can dig too. This means that your fence will need to be high enough so that the animal can’t jump over it. If you have other wildlife that makes a nuisance of itself in the local area, you may want to consider the impact that having a fence, especially a high one, will have. If you install a six foot wooden fence around the perimeter of your back garden, for example, and this makes it easy for a squirrel to get right to your attic, or maybe even a raccoon or an opossum, you may have just made your own life difficult. Sometimes you will need to think about more than one animal at a time, depending on where you live. This is why we would recommend working with a professional wildlife removal operator to make sure you don't make any mistakes.

Fences are just part of a range of exclusion devices that you could use to keep these critters out, and other wildlife too. If you add a layer of protection below the fence, you will stop the foxes from digging under. There are a couple of ways that you can do this. You could use stones, rocks, gravel and other sharp or abrasive materials mixed in with the soil. Certain animals, such as moles, won't appreciate that sharp feeling much, and they won't dig there if the discomfort continues.

At the same time, digging a trench under the fence to affix a mesh wire addition is a great idea. You would need to make sure this reaches down about one to two feet below the fence, and shaped like an ‘L’. If the animal manages to dig down further than the mesh goes, the bottom section of that ‘L’ shape will prevent them from digging up the other side. It’s a clever trick, and it doesn't actually take that long to do. You can have most of the property modifications done in just one weekend, if you make sure that you have everything to hand to begin with. That one weekend spent now will save you a whole load of time and effort later. Getting rid of wildlife that has already moved in is well known to be an almost impossible task.

You could turn to repellents to keep those foxes out, but there are actually very few of them that work well. Any liquid-based repellents will need to be reapplied regularly, such as after rain, or after you have watered the lawn. Even if it hasn’t rained or been watered away, the effectiveness of the repellent will decrease over time, and you will need to keep reapplying it to make sure it has any effect. That’s if it even had any effect to begin with.

If you were to use a $20 bottle of so-called fox repellent that you bought off the internet every two weeks for a year, you’d spend over $500 on the repellent in that year. You can't stop using the stuff, because when you do, the fox family will come back. And, yes, it almost always is a family too — a mother with her cubs. For $500, you could have hired a professional and had your property professionally dealt with. Also: it probably (definitely) wouldn't have taken a year to achieve.

That's the thing with repellents — they don't actually solve any problems. They do create a few, in some cases, such as mains-operated devices adding extra costs to your energy bills. The moment you stop using them, there is nothing to keep the animal at bay. It is free to come back and set up a home again, just like it did at least once before.

We would always recommend fencing to a property owner with a fox property, and we would definitely recommend investing in some hardware cloth or mesh wiring. This can give an added layer of protection to vulnerable areas, such as chicken coops, rabbit hutches, and even feeding spots for pets and other animals. That's alongside using it at the underground layer of protection around the perimeter of your property.

You should also take a good hard look at your land too. How much in the way of food are you actually leaving out for these animals at night? It is because you are feeding them that they keep coming back, whether that's intentional or not. Foxes eat almost anything. Literally, anything. They'll eat an animal carcass in the middle of the road that has been hit by a vehicle, and it will even run the risk of being hit by a vehicle by attempting to get to the road kill. When you never know where the next meal is coming from, it pays to take a few risks if it might be worth the big dish.

As well as carrion, foxes will eat berries and fruit, vegetables, herbs, plants, insects, chickens, pets, rats, mice, opossums, pretty much everything it can get its teeth around. It's a scavenger, so it'll think nothing of having a good root through your garbage bag. It will also eat food that you might leave out for your pets. Bird feeders make for a great snacks, as do unprotected chickens in a coop. You must make sure that you are not feeding these foxes their dinner up on a silver platter, and if you don't clear up your yard, that's essentially what you are doing. If you continue to leave food out in such a careless way, no amount of fencing and underground barriers will keep the critters out. They'll find a way to get in, because it's worth their while to do.

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