Attenborough made these foxes famous. Who poisoned them?

Jaia Lloyd suddenly stills her fork mid-turn in the dark soil of her allotment. “There’s one!” she says, hushed but excited. A few meters away, a black nose, two triangular ears and a curvaceous red tail emerge behind a roll of wire fencing. A fox. “They usually come out about time,” Lloyd adds, straightening her back slowly so as not to scare the creature as it treads lightly over a vegetable plot, its gaze fixed on us.

It is late afternoon on a grey Saturday in north London and, as Lloyd plants potatoes, the foxes begin to appear behind sheds, compost bins and water troughs: flashes of cinnamon against the spring green grass, rhubarb and broccoli. 

This allotment has become synonymous with urban foxes since it was featured in the BBC’s Wild London documentary on New Year's Day. A former railway track running between two rows of houses, the animals have lived in this peaceful enclave for years, though it was the visit from natural history doyen David Attenborough that really made them into celebrities.

So when five foxes were found dead nearby on a single day earlier this month, along with a pet cat, residents were shocked. Soon, the rumours started, and reports of meat dumped on a street corner seemed to point to one explanation: poisoning.

But is there any substance to the conspiracy, or is it simply gossip gone mad in an animal-loving neighbourhood? And, if true, why? I prowled around the allotments of north London in a bid to find out.

The scene of the crime

“The council said it was the fifth phone call they’d had that particular day,” explains resident Geoff Taylor, referring to the Monday in early March when residents found the dead animals. Taylor works at a school near to the allotments, and often walks his corgi-cross Rocky around the local parks. I speak to him at the end of his shift, Rocky at his side.

He tells me that he and a neighbour, IT worker Michael Chan, called Haringey council's dead animal removal service after finding a dead young fox. “It started dying in the school, then crawled under the fence into a neighbouring garden,” Taylor recalls. The school called the RSPCA and other rescue services, which were unable to attend. When the fox died, Taylor visited Chan for help bagging up its body for collection. 

Many foxes live in the area, and Taylor has seen dead ones in the school grounds before, killed by car accidents or injuries sustained in fights — particularly during mating season in December to February. But this fox was different. “When I looked at it, it didn't have any external injuries,” Taylor says. “Before it died it was breathing very heavily. I could see its stomach rising and falling quite a lot. That's what made me think it had been poisoned.”

On the other side of the school fence, Chan shows me the spot in his neighbour’s garden where the school fox died, among bits of broken fencing and bricks. He describes to me how, shortly before Taylor knocked on his door, he’d noticed a WhatsApp message on a local community group reporting another dead fox. A resident living near the allotments had found this one in her back garden and, distressed, she asked the group for help. When she reported the incident to the council for collection, she saw five cases pinned on a map on the council’s website. On that same morning, a road away, yet another neighbour reported a dead tabby cat in their back garden, in the hope of finding its owner.

It was only when a member of the WhatsApp group reported finding a “pile of ribs” placed on a nearby street corner that people began to suspect foul play. Were they laced with poison? “You wouldn’t leave meat or bones outside your house,” says Chan. “That seems a bit suspicious.” Others went one step further: what if someone was targeting the foxes because of their appearance on Wild London?