Most days, my kids pretend that they are other animals. Sometimes they are fantastic beasts—we have a lot of dragons and griffins. Sometimes, they’re creatures that we’re more familiar with, like dogs and seals. But most of the time, they are fennec foxes.
I’m not quite sure how they even know about fennec foxes. There is a character in the movie Zootopia who is a fennec fox named Finnick. But the two fennec foxes we have in the house, who hide on the rug under blankets and make dens in the couch pillows, have never seen the movie.
Fennecs are natives of Africa, with enormous ears and tiny bodies—they’re the smallest foxes in the world. They’re specially adapted to the desert, inside and out. Their kidneys can hold onto water, the blood vessels in those charming ears dissipate heat. Their feet have fur on the soles, which protects them from the searing sand.
They’re hunters, and hunted. Their enormous ears can hear prey—like rodents and insects—underground. African eagle owls, in turn, can swoop down on the fennec.
But what makes them so agreeable to the imagination? There are a few at our local zoo. Most days, you can find them curled against the clear window of the exhibit in the sunshine, yawning and dozing. They’re nocturnal, so I’ve never seen them move much at all.
The sign at the zoo cautions against having exotic animals like the fennec as pets. At the time Zootopia was released last year in China, the Los Angeles Times reported a surge of interest in fennec foxes from movie fans. The article said that, unlike other animated movies—which sparked sales of clown fish and Dalmatians around the world—the fennec fox boom seemed unique to China. But when I looked around, it still seems like there are ways to get a fennec closer to home if you really wanted one.
I do not want one. I already have two.
I asked the elder of the fennec foxes what it was he liked about fennecs. “I just like them because I like them. And I like them because they sleep cute and because they’re fast.”
“They’re fast?” I asked. I thought back to the times that we’d seen them at the zoo. Really, the only part that seemed to move was their mouth, as they yawned.
“Maybe that was the meerkat,” he said. (When I looked it up, I learned that fennec foxes are indeed fast: their top speed is close to 30 mph, and they’re very agile—they can leap away from predators and dig a hidey-hole (or find breakfast in a hidey-hole) in a flash.)
I thought about the fennec foxes I’d seen. They did sleep cute. But how long could you really watch a fennec fox sleep, anyway? And as one of the people quoted in the LA Times said, “…[our foxes] are very active at night and jump all over the bedroom, which is very noisy.”
It’s true, my pair of foxes often are very noisy, and jump all over the bedroom, sometimes at night. But then they sleep. And I could watch that for a long time, because I like them. Because I like them.
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Fennec fox photo by Christophe Andre via Flickr/Creative Commons license