The life of "the vixen": The socioecological composition of survival in an individual urban fox

Abstract

What does it mean for an animal to survive in the city? The survival of non-humans is often conceived and regulated at the level of the species, but this occludes how within certain landscapes and sets of relations the fates of individual animals within a species can be very different. This is particularly true in cities, where the adaptations of animals to novel environments can alter their ecologies, social dynamics and life histories. This presentation tells the story of one individual red fox termed ‘the vixen’, the people she lives alongside, and the means by which she forges a life in an inner-city neighbourhood of London. ‘The vixen’ is typical of many urban foxes: she is an adult who, unlike her rural counterparts, did not disperse when she reached adolescence, instead staying in her parents’ territory and increasing her chances of survival in the city, where the mortality rate of dispersing foxes is high. Through her story this paper argues that for urban ecologies understanding who and what survives in the city means looking beyond indices of endangerment premised on species population and abundance, and instead being attentive to the forms of inhabitation of individual animals and the relations and arrangements that sustain them. London is a city where, unlike the countryside, foxes like ‘the vixen’ survive, but this survival is fragile and contingent, dependent on a complex composition of her own behavioural ecology, the environmental subjectivities of her human neighbours, and wider political economies that shape urban habitat.