Freaky, freaky Friday (Patreon)

We had a very freaky week here at Fox HQ, but yesterday was the doozy icing on top of the crazy cake - so crazy in fact that we wanted to bring it to you in a separate update from our weekly round up!

As you know it’s been a full moon this week, and this always makes the foxes a little twitchier than normal; tempers have been shorter, sharing food and toys has been markedly less and cuddles have been slimmer in their pickings; but yesterday was a hum dinger.

One of our smallest yards is our Red Yard (so called because of the colour of the enclosures) and in that yard are Archer, Duchess, Bongo, Shadow and Nikita. The red yard is also one of our rotation yards, meaning that Duchess and Archer do not get on with Bongo and Shadow so they have separate yard time. Yesterday was Archer and Duchess’ day - they usually run around her enclosure and Bongo’s when first out, to say ‘haha you’re inside today!’ And then go about their business - and boy did they want to wind up Shadow, who, for the first time in a long time, had gone into a different enclosure. They couldn’t hurt her, but this different enclosure had less fox boxes in for her to pop out of their sight. I was doing morning chores and, seeing Archer and Duchess winding Shadow up, went to try and distract them away to do something else, tripped on the ice and fell flat on my face.

So, so far we have extra mean Archer and Duchess and me falling flat.

I decided to try and kennel Shadow to move her back to her usual enclosure, so went into our large garage, which has storage above to grab a crate. On my way back down the stairs, one of them gave out under my foot and I almost took a tumble. It didn’t snap, it literally went to vertical from its usual horizontal.

So far:

- mean Duchess and Archer

- falling flat on face

-almost killed by horizontalling of step

I moved Shadow to her usual enclosure, but that’s not a very interesting story!

Next, was the main yard - where Valentine, Jack, Luka and Felix are our foxes with yard time and new boys Scotch and Shiloh are still on enclosure time. Foxes can take quite a while to decide if they will accept another fox, particularly where one of them is over 4 years of age. Unfortunately we realised quite quickly that Shiloh and Scotch will not be able to have yard time with Jack and Luka. Shiloh they now largely ignore, but Scotch, they are still occasionally making sure definitely knows his place and yesterday, just like with Archer and Duchess, Luka became utterly fixated on giving Scotch a bad day, so Luka ended up in a ‘time out’ (what we mean by this is if normal distraction doesn’t work outside of the enclosure, we give a ‘hard work’ treat in the enclosure to completely engross and distract a fox)! It doesn’t happen often at all, but whatever was in the air yesterday, gave some foxes who don’t get along nothing but the will to give their nemesis a bad time. Luka was on time out with an egg for 30 mins and once let back into the yard proceeded to ignore Scotch for the rest of the day. The same was true of Archer and Duchess once Shadow was back in her usual spot.

- mean Archer and Duchess

- flat on face

- trick step

- mean Luka on time out

I’ll list the remainder of the days craziness below, and thankfully, it doesn’t need half as much context!

- mean Malachi to Milo - Malachi got an egg-based ‘time-out’

- Stevie the cat got his revenge on Muttias for chasing him by punching him in the nose and chasing him right back (first ever!)

- it took us 3 hours yesterday to be able to buy toilet paper and other rescue related supplies

- we have had to reinstall baby locks on all the cupboards in the house because Waverly, just like a cat, does not believe in closed doors and if given access, steals any and all food or items stored there and yesterday she took a bunch of freeze dried raw treats, two closed tins and a sealed bag of squirrel food. She also steals the toilet paper if we don’t close the bathroom door!

I hope some, if not all of the above, gave you a good chuckle, I’m definitely laughing about it now - there’s never really a quiet day here and I’m glad I could share the bonkers of yesterday with you all!

-Merri