Quote:
Originally Posted by davecatt  HI Pat
This sounds like poisoning and should be acted on, if any more are found please, for the sake of your foxes and other wild life, try to keep the carcass safe from scavengers but save it for examition and call DEFRA, they will act promptly to determin the cause of death.
As for why anyone should poison foxes my imediate thought is game keeper protecting his pheasants, though it is possible that the poison was picked up further afield as foxes can travel a long way in search of food.
Good luck
Dave |
While I doubt it is poison I dont want to get into an argument but would offer the following (from my experience of preserving badgers and dead BoPs for post mortem).
first off symptoms of poisioning vary tremendously from substance to substance and can include extreme rigour mortis (strychnine), a lot of froth arround the mouth (various poisons including pesticides and cymag), or the inability of blood to clot , causing a bleed out from even small wounds (vitamin D based rat posion)
Secondly note that some poisons can persist in the body for a long time after death and can transfer from the corpse through your skin so protect yourself by wearing full clothing (long sleeves etc) and rubber gloves (you can buy disposable latex ones from B&Q etc)
Thirdly it can take a while for post mortems to be arranged and some poisons break down after death - to stop this (and to stop natural decomposition) the corpse needs to be frozen - people who do this a lot have a seperate freezer , and I can fully understand you not wanting to put a potentially poisoned fox in your food freezer - therefore you may be able to arrange for your local vet/rspca centre etc to freeze the corpse for you. If you do decide to freeze it yourself triple bag it using bin bags and black tape and keep it at the bottom of the freezer if possible seperated from the other food by a tarp or similar
and finally
fourthly - note that post mortems are expensive and your local vet/rspca/defra/ police WLO may not be willing to do it for common/pest species or where there are other plausible explanations- so check before you go to the trouble of collecting a corpse and freezing it etc.