When I was a child they murdered my chickens. All of them. And then came back and murdered the new ones.

Now I'm an adult they copulate loudly at night in the bushes below my bedroom and have running battles in the street.

They wake my dog up at 3am and at 3.20am and at 3.40am. Then they foul in the garden and when I let the dog out he gobbles it up... repeatedly.

It's disgusting. They're disgusting and yet after 30 years I'm finally beginning to feel sorry for the foxes who have plagued my existence.

In general, the bad behaviour of animals can be traced back to humans and this is no different.

There is an assassin who is paid handsomely by the residents of posh London boroughs to sit in their homes at night and pick off vulpine invaders with a rifle.

His record for a single evening's shooting in one garden is 13 but when let loose on a golf course he blasted 36.

He was doing a job and cannot be blamed.

But as for the residents of the posh London boroughs? I think they are possibly psychopaths.

Some club together and pay the hit man to visit their street.

They wake up in the morning with a clear conscience, fully aware he's been sat in the bedroom of No.56 firing and reloading and firing and reloading and leaving the manicured lawn spattered with blood and brains. Then they load the kids into their Chelsea tractors and drive the 300 yards to the school gates.

Vulpicide is a grey area. The fox assassin is licensed and legal but using things like crossbows, explosives and gas could land you with a jail stint and £20,000 fine.

'With more and more development - much of which is necessary - we are going to have to start to live with our enemy...'

When the prominent KC Jolyon Maugham battered a fox to death on Boxing Day while wearing his wife's satin kimono he was spared prosecution because it was judged the trapped critter who'd been trying to get to his chickens had died swiftly.

But if he'd used a grenade instead he could have been banged up - despite the animal's demise being swifter still.

With more and more development - much of which is necessary - we are going to have to start to live with our enemy.

Kent is dotted with swathes of farmland set to be transformed into sprawling settlements. When that happens the woodland they butt up against will be disturbed or partially destroyed and the foxes who have called it home for generations will stray out and hassle their new human neighbours.

Should we welcome them with a bullet between the eyes? No we shouldn't.

Estimates back this up, with urban fox populations booming and rural reynards in decline.

There are 357,000 of them in the UK, according to the most recent of the notably inaccurate studies, but with more of them migrating to the suburbs and yuppies seemingly all too keen to pay someone to take them out how long can we rely on this relatively healthy population?

As much as I struggle to warm to the slyest of all the mammals I respect them and think you should too.

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