3 Essential Steps To Take If You Want To Keep Foxes Away
Three things you can do immediately that will make it much easier to deter foxes from your garden for the long term.
If you’ve got fox problems in your garden and are thinking about taking steps to keep them out, you need to be aware you are up against a very formidable creature.
Foxes are highly perceptive and intelligent animals and should not be underestimated when you’re attempting to discourage them from your garden.
That being said, there are some important things to bear in mind that will give you a competitive advantage and put a stop to the problems they’ve been causing you.
1. Find the entry point to your garden
Foxes are creatures of habit and will usually come into your garden at the same point each time. By working out where this place is, you will find it much easier to stop the fox from coming in.
The reason is because the entry point is where the fox makes a decision on whether it’s safe or not to enter your garden.
Currently, the fox is probably approaching your garden with absolutely nothing to make it think twice about entering. No strange sounds, no strange smells, no reason not to go in.
Your next course of action needs to be targeting the entrance with a fox deterrent.
Creating doubt and suspicion at the entry point ensures the fox’s ‘sensory alarms’ are triggered immediately, before it has even set foot in your garden.
You’ll be nipping the issue in the bud, putting the fox off before it gets the chance to foul, dig or cause any other problems that you’ve been experiencing.
2. Use different types of fox deterrent
To make it very clear to the fox that it’s not welcome, it’s best to use at least two different types of fox deterrent.
A great combination, for example, would be to use an ultrasonic deterrent and a scent-based repellent. This ensures that you’re targeting the fox’s sense of hearing and sense of smell, both of which they rely upon to alert them to danger.
If two separate instincts are warning a fox there’s a potentially risky situation ahead, you’ll have a much greater chance of getting it to avoid your garden altogether.
3. You must be patient
Patience seems to be an unfashionable virtue in this day and age, but if you want to keep foxes out of your garden, you’re going to need a lot of it.
Just because you locate the entry point and use two different types of deterrent, it doesn’t mean the fox will suddenly give up its territory and disappear overnight.
On the contrary, if you introduce a strange sound or smell into your garden, an intelligent fox will be back again to see what the hell is going on. It will want to know what this inconvenience is, if it can be overpowered (by more pooing and urinating) and if it’s permanent or temporary.
This is why it’s important you don’t just use a deterrent once – that won’t be enough. You need to keep using it to ensure the fox gets the message that things have changed and your garden is now permanently off limits.
It’s only through the repeated use of a fox deterrent that you’ll get the fox to change its attitude and behaviour towards your garden so that it stays away.
Indeed, the best way to judge the effectiveness of a fox deterrent is not whether the fox has completely disappeared or not, but rather if you’re seeing less of the fox than you were previously.