Hello this is Ben from the Fox Repellent Expert website and welcome to episode 12 of this podcast.

In this episode, I’m going to talk about the surprisingly common issue of foxes and their attraction to football goal nets, and what you can do to avoid any problems in your garden in future.

Now, this episode was prompted by a lady I was talking to from Tooting, in South London. She said that a family of foxes lived in a garden a couple of doors down, and one of the foxes was coming into her garden and making a nuisance of itself by tearing and shredding her son’s goal net.

That is an annoying problem, not least because when you score a goal, it’s very satisfying to hear the sound of the ball nestling in the back of the net. It’s much less fun when the ball disappears out the back of the goal because a fox has chewed a great big hole in it!

This lady had already bought two new nets and was understandably frustrated that she had to buy yet another, so I really sympathised.

There is a pretty simple way to stop foxes destroying football nets but I’ll come to that in a minute, because this actually raises a much more serious issue that needs addressing.

For some reason, foxes, and especially young foxes, are quite attracted to goal nets. Nets can flutter in the breeze and can easily be moved around with a paw, so it might be that foxes enjoy playing and practising their hunting skills on them, like a cat might do with a ball of string, it’s hard to say exactly. Sometimes a fox can accidentally run into a net when scared and trying to make a quick escape from a garden.

Whatever the actual reason foxes are drawn to them, football nets can pose a serious danger to foxes and are very often responsible for causing serious injury and even death.

What happens is a fox can quickly get tangled up in the net and have its movement restricted. In its effort to free itself it can start to panic, fighting to escape, getting more and more entangled in the process.

This can lead to horrible constriction and strangulation wounds as the netting tightens around a limb, a neck or a muzzle. And if the fox can’t free itself, or isn’t freed by someone, then it may well die a slow and painful death. Not pleasant at all for a fox, or anyone that finds it, yet this is an issue that is much more common in urban back gardens than you might think.

I was recently watching some videos on the excellent Wildlife Aid YouTube channel.

Wildlife Aid is a wildlife rescue centre based in Surrey and they get called out to all kinds of situations where there’s a wild animal in distress.

On their channel you can find a lot of rescue missions involving foxes caught in football nets. It often requires delicate unravelling of a very stressed fox from the net and the injuries can be quite severe, often needing treatment by a vet back at the animal hospital.

Fortunately, most of the videos shown on the channel have a positive ending and all of the injured foxes are released back into the wild once they’ve recovered, but what we don’t see are the numerous other cases where the fox’s injuries are too severe to survive.

What the videos highlight very clearly is how such a seemingly innocuous and everyday garden item can be incredibly dangerous to wildlife. It’s not just foxes either, there’s also videos of a hedgehog and a badger cub stuck in a football net, so it’s a problem that affects a wide range of animals.

So what can you do to stop foxes chewing holes or getting caught in your football net? Well, the answer from Wildlife Aid is very straightforward and it doesn’t include banning everyone from putting a goal in their back garden or anything extreme like that.

All you need to do is remember to lift the net up off the ground by a foot or two when not in use. There’s normally some hooks or clips running up the back of the goal posts so you can hang the bottom of the net up away from the floor while the goal isn’t being used.

If you can find some way to do it, this simple tip will put the net out of reach of foxes, stop it from being chewed and will strongly reduce the possibility of you going out into your garden one day to find an injured fox or other animal thrashing about between your goal posts.

If you are unlucky enough to find a fox caught in your netting, just keep calm and call your local wildlife rescue centre. They should hopefully be able to send someone out who has the appropriate tools to free the stricken animal and they will be able to make a professional judgement on whether the fox can be released or if it needs further treatment. I’m sure they’d appreciate a small donation from you as well.

That’s it for this episode of the Fox Repellent Expert podcast. I hope that’s been informative and has some useful information if you’ve got foxes and a football net in your back garden. I’ll put some links in the show notes for this episode which you can find at foxrepellentexpert.com/episode12.

If you found today’s episode interesting, you can subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Please feel free to leave a review.

Thank you very much for listening and I’ll see you next time.