Ben Smith from Thornton Heath in South London is quietly watching television in his sitting room when he's joined by an uninvited guest. A fox with sharp teeth and bad breath is staring at him, whilst inching towards the spare place on his sofa. It's the third such visit and Ben has had enough.
His guest is one of more than 30,000 foxes that have moved into Britain's towns and cities. Infact, around one in seven of all foxes are now townies. Most live in leafy outer suburbs like Ben's, but more and more are heading for city centres with sightings at places like Buckingham Palace Gardens and the House of Lords.
Many homeowners are welcoming the new arrivals by leaving out food and milk on their back lawns. But others complain that foxes are digging up their gardens, fouling their lawns, attacking their pets and ripping open their garbage bags. All of this is proving a big boom for pest control firms like the one run by Bruce Lyndsay-Smith, who says foxes are now bigger business than rodents. He's found them in urban lofts, cellars, sheds and even up people's chimneys.
This balding man with a boxer's body was called in by Ben Smith to get rid of his fox intruder. The Today programme joined him for an overnight vigil. As dusk set in Mr Lyndsay-Smith set up a trap containing a prime piece of lamb which he carefully placed inside a wire cage. Finally, after an eleven hour wait, the fox, now named Fred, took the bait and was finally behind bars. He was later released unharmed in an urban woodland around ten minutes drive away.
Fred is lucky. Some home owners have got so fed up with foxes that they're calling in specially trained marksmen to shoot them. I teamed up with one such small game hunter on a night time safari in the midlands. Fearing retribution from animal rights activists he asked for his identity to be concealed. But this latter day Ernest Hemmingway, who spends much of the year shooting wild beasts in Southern Africa, wasn't making any further concessions to urban foxes or their friends.
Late at night we sped off in his dusty landrover to answer calls to eliminate a batch of foxes that are making a nuisance of themselves at a nearby golf course. With the aid of a giant red tinted portable searchlight and two high powered rifles the hunt is underway. Within a couple of hours five foxes are dead.
"Some people think foxes are lovely", he told me, "but before long they have all sorts of problems and realise that my method is really the only answer". The Mammal Society couldn't agree less. In it's view foxes do little real damage and and don't need culling because they control their own numbers naturally. But some desperate home owners fear that without guns and cages we''ll soon need surburban hunters and hounds.
