Pica is eating things that are not food, but as pointed out in the article I linked, eating dog poo is providing a significant source of nutrition for foxes. In those circumstances, it by definition is not pica.

Pet dogs also eat poo on occasion, also without any underlying problem, so I really don’t think there’s any reason to think that far less domesticated species where it is well established would just stop. I’m sure you can reduce it, especially if it has a nicer food source, but still, an animal with far less history of domestication seems like a recipe for amplification of all the potential issues you don’t want to deal with.

Rabies isn’t much of a problem in the UK thankfully. But in general, yeah, Rabies is horrifying and it’s good advice.

EDIT: For anyone anywhere where it’s a risk: Be careful and make damn sure to seek advice if bitten, even if not obviously penetrating the skin and even if the animal is not obviously rabid (Reminder: Rabies is near 100% fatal with treatment if you don’t get vaccinated soon enough after exposure). Do not fuck with Rabies.

Yeah, foxes are best enjoyed from a distance, in my opinion. I’m perfectly happy with having them visit, but they can stay outside.

To the “they smell bad” bit, I’ll add two things:

1. I have pictures (maybe I’ll post some, despite the ick factor) where this fox laid down to sleep right next to a pillow it had shit all over. And we’re not talking pebbles, we’re talking the runs and it was a nightmare to clean. It was tempting to burn the thing… I also have to clean massive piles of fox poop off the decking on a regular basis.

2. There is this: Dog poo forms a significant part of foxes’ diet

Of course, one captive-bred will likely be better, but I absolutely agree with you they won’t make great pets.

They are cute, but frankly, that is just about sufficient to let me tolerate them sleeping in the gazebo and thoroughly washing stuff afterward, but not nearly sufficient to make me consider one as a pet.

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Funny thing is it’s not a proper lake, and not very old. It’s an artificial basin that was originally prepared to allow for control of the height of a canal dug all the way from the Thames a few miles away, for transport. But they finished it not long before the railway came, and it went bankrupt, and the canal path itself was sold off to a railway company and is now the path of one of the main London rail lines. As a result there are roads near me, nowhere near water, named things like Towpath Way and Canal Walk.

The foxes are still more shy here for the most part. They’ll run if I open the door or if they see me move too much inside, while the cats will sometimes come to me and some of them (that one in particular) will come inside. But the gazebo is too tempting for both cats and foxes when I’m not out there.

That’s true. It’s been an issue near me as well. Thankfully in the most built up parts of London the foxes seems to mostly have enough food to not be particularly interested in cats. But I always keep an eye out when I see the cats here get close to foxes in case it turns nasty (not happened so far).

This is basically the concept of a Webring, and used to be big. Some were fixed (as in the path through the ring was always the same), but some were more flexible or random or semi-random.

A decentralised approach would be new, and not necessarily too hard since the dataset for each ring would be small, so each member could just store all or a subset of the entries in their ring and submit updates to their “neighbours” in the ring that’d eventually spread out to everyone. The challenge is moderation - you’ll still end up with some entities that have a privileged position to weed out bad entries, because the appeal was always to a large extent to make discovery “someone else’s problem” and the moment you let someone put links on your site someone will try to abuse it.