brown bear

foxcompare the tails!An infected fox can be distinguished by missing hair and a scruffy appearanceEstonian Museum of Natural History•Dangerous Nature: Myths & RealityGetting bitten by a rabies-infected fox was a completelyrealistic cause of human death just a dozen years ago. Thanks tocountrywide vaccination campaigns we can now say that Estoniais rabies-free. (True, some single sick animals have still beenencountered in border regions and vaccination continues there.)Thus, the stories about oddly behaving foxes attacking humansare starting to become history, and who knows, perhaps theywill one day start being modified into legends of killer foxes.Those highly adaptable curious animals, being good at coveringtheir tracks and inventive in escaping from critical situations,have also become a symbol of cunning and dexterity in folktales. Unfortunately, they have still received mostly negativeattention also in recent years. They venture into cities fromthe wild, they have scabies, they are accused of dwindling thenumbers of ground nesting birds and the European hare. All thishas resulted from their overly high numbers.Scabies or sarcoptic mange has always existed among foxes.Now that the numbers of the animals have skyrocketed, it hassimply started spreading like wildfire. In addition to directcontact, foxes can catch the parasite – the itch mite that causesthe disease – also just by stepping into the tracks of an infectedanimal. Also the raccoon dogs of our forests are badly scabbed,while the disease is less common among wolves and, especially,lynx. Even humans can catch the disease through a dog who hasbeen tracking a fox, but as itch mites cannot reproduce in humanskin, the itchy rash will disappear by itself after a while.Only when the numbers of foxes decrease can the spread ofthe disease diminish. Time will show whether this havoc will bedone by scabies itself or some other diseases will also comeinto play. Humans are unable to controlthe numbers of foxes by hunting.animals 8