I had a rare treat for around here nowadays, a red fox beating cheeks across the highway in the dark while I was driving home.

When I was kid, there used to be a lot of reddies in eastern SD. I knew a couple of guys at church in the mid-to-late 70s that used to aerial gun k-9s in the eastern part of the state and they always got more fox than yotes. That situation has flipped in the last 40 years. When you ask rural landowners about fox, nowadays, the answer is almost always, "there's a few around" and yes that is true but rarely caught or seen. Coyotes now rule the wild k-9 world in e. SD. I think if I would catch a reddie this season, especially in a live cage, I think I'd let them go. Unless I decided to make some taxidermy trinkets out of them...

Will letting a reddy release solve your personal conviction,..that they will thrive?

seeing a lot more up here the last couple years.

Have to catch one first...

I use to have a family of them that lived in the back of my field they never bothered me so I left them be 2 years ago coyotes moved in and wiped out the pups haven’t seen one since