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what to do. They’d starve to death.”
These foxes aren’t the scourge of the farmer’s hen house. They wouldn’t eat a chicken if it was plucked and served to them on a silver platter. According to Thomas, they'll nibble at an occasional chicken liver but that's about it. His foxes thrive on a diet of commercially prepared pellets, a dog chow for foxes, with an occasional apple tossed in for variety.
Despite their acclamation to life in a cage, the little foxes never will be -truly domesticated. “You can’t pet them or play with them. They’re not tame. You have to handle them by the tail so they can’t bite you. When you’ve got them by the tail, they can’t turn their heads," Baldwin explained.
Good Multiplier!
In captivity, foxes breed in February with the gyp whelping a litter of eight to eighteen pups in April. The babies are full grown in about six months, Baldwin reported. “I don’t want to get too big into breeding them. I’ll keep some for my grandkids—maybe five gyps. That would give me about 50 pups per year. They accumulate mighty fast!"
Thomas got his stock from a dealer out of New York who has been buying furs from the Sperryville businessman for the past eight years. “He has thirty some hundred silver and blue pups. He has his own tannery and his own coat factory. He’s a right big operator,” Baldwin reported.
Thomas plans to buy a pair of silver foxes for $1,200 from his New York connection this winter and breed them as well as the blues on a small scale. Silvers offer a bigger profit margin with pelts selling in Hong Kong for $685, he reported.
Besides eating essentially
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