I have noticed that red fox in southwest Alaska seem to be pretty tame, I've even seen them come sit around a camp fire with a few guys. I have no experience with red fox anywhere else. These pictures were taken on our front porch.
Is this common behavior for red fox.

Cool pics, thanks for sharing. Nice fox too.

I've seen a lot of that over the years too. I had one walk right into my camp one evening. Came up to the fire and started licking my metal plate. Sat down and enjoyed the warmth of the fire. This was February if I recall.

I think some of that is due to rarely or never seeing humans in the past.

Animals are curious.
A few years ago I was sitting in the kitchen one level up in a tri- level home reading Trapperman archives about 2 A.M.
I could feel some one or thing watching me and it gave me a chill up my spine.
I flipped off the light and looked out to see a coyote sitting on the sidewalk 20 feet away, watching me through the window.

When I was a kid we had 2 half mile drainage ditches on our farm with fox dens in the banks.
In the spring the adult fox would follow the plow catching mice, as long as the tractor kept moving.

If it stopped they would run off a ways then stop and look back, because they had been educated.

Wife and I were on a tour on Denali and a red came up to a small group of people, peed on a bush, and walked right through the group as it crossed the gravel road.

My aunts dad kept a shotgun on the tractor , coyote would be getting closer and closer every pass , if he stopped the tractor they would run off.

he would push in the clutch just as he was ready to pull the trigger and could hit them before they could turn and run.

I had a red fox pup on a job site in Branson that I could almost feed by hand. After a few weeks in the same subdivision when the machines shut down at noon he'd come out of the woods. Looking back that was the wrong thing to do.

If you let them.

We had foxes that “tamed” up at two different coal mines. They would come into the bath house and the guys would feed them sandwiches. I didn’t see much good coming of it, for the foxes or the guys at the mine. I told them it would be a good idea to keep the doors closed, and eventually they quit coming.

Yes, on Kodiak they will come right into camp, especially if you have a deer

Yes, on Kodiak they will come right into camp, especially if you have a deer

It seems like red fox get acclimated to humans relatively easy if they are fed and are not hunted or trapped.

Years ago I was waiting my turn to either pick up or drop off a load (can't remember which) of lumber at a distribution center in northern PA and I was watching the guard in the guard shack throwing a tennis ball for a red fox . The fox would run out , pick it up and bring it back to the guard . This went on for a while and the fox finally got bored and started mousing in a field next to the line of trucks . When it was my turn to go in I asked the guard about the fox . He said it just showed up one day and started hanging around . The guard brought the ball in one day to see what the fox would do when he threw it . The fox chased the ball and then started bringing it back to the guard . He said he never fed it or anything , it just showed up to play with that ball .

I remember reading a long time back about the army using reds to locate land mines.

Neat subject . I too have heard several stories of reds playing ball with people the same way.

I like the sounds they make in discussing their day

Sue, the rough gal on the Alaska Bush show, has fox hanging around her place all the time. I think they'd be good company.

I had one started hanging around the house too often a few years ago. I would set the buckets of rat carcasses right out the back garage door and he would eat out of them every night. That went on for about 2 months. It was mid December and I figured he was about as prime as he was going to get so after the rats went in the bucket a 220 went on top. Very pretty fox that I managed to tame. I taught him to "Stay" (on the board) and he did until the NAFA truck came in January.

When I was a kid my Dad brought home a baby Fox. We raised it in the house like a puppy. It would sit on our laps when we'd watch t.v. Once it hit around a year old it started to stink so it wound up going to the Oshkosh Zoo. The Fox named "Sissy" really loved my Mom and vice versa. A year or so later we visited the zoo and my Mom called at Sissy. The Fox was kind of whimpering and rubbing itself on the pen. Really kind of sad to see.

Moosetrot

We had a family of red fox living in our back yard this spring and they were pretty friendly. They would regularly come within 10-15 feet and would come up on the deck and front steps. I can only imagine if we fed them how tame they would've gotten. Due to having young kids at home I didn't want them any closer than than were for everyone's sake. They sure were fun to watch, especially the kits playing.

I have an egg dump for eggs that don't hatch when I incubate them. I get a lot of red fox coming for the eggs. For a few years, I had one huge, very old, stinky, poorly furred, male fox that would come running when I went to dump a wheelbarrow of eggs. He would trot by within 6 feet of me to get to the eggs. I had a bunch of younger fox that would get within about a dozen feet from me.

Last year, the old fox disappeared and something, probably coyotes killed and ate one of the younger reds just down from my egg dump.




A lot of people keep color variations of red fox as pets.





A lot of people keep kit fox as pets too now.



Keith