In recent years, the sale of foxes as pets has become a growing problem, with online platforms allowing advertisements that promote these wild animals as suitable for domestic life. While foxes are portrayed as tame and loving in these ads, the reality is far different. Foxes are wild animals, not domesticated pets, and keeping them in homes often leads to devastating consequences for both the animals and their owners.

Foxes require large, secure outdoor spaces, and they don't adapt well to apartment living. As they grow, many develop aggressive behaviours, and their scent-marking makes them difficult to keep indoors. Sadly, when owners are unable to cope, many foxes are abandoned, left to suffer in unfamiliar environments or die as a result of road accidents, starvation, or human harm. This reflects the call from Black Foxes UK, to Regulate Fox Keeping in the UK.

More information available in our blog post: Why Fox Keeping Needs Regulation.

What's worse, many foxes sold as pets are bred by fur farms, a practice that not only exploits the animals but also indirectly supports the fur industry, which is overwhelmingly opposed by the public. This petition calls on online advertising platforms to take responsibility and stop allowing these harmful ads to be posted. By doing so, we can reduce the unnecessary suffering of foxes and encourage more responsible pet ownership.

The Petition

"To online advertising portals

We are asking you to block the possibility of posting ads for the sale of foxes. Under the current law, the sale of foxes as pets is legal, but it is done to great harm - both to the animals and to the buyers.Foxes are advertised as tame, gentle and attached to humans. Photos of fox puppies eating from a bottle mislead buyers and build unrealistic expectations of these creatures, and sellers obviously do not accept "returns" of animals that will grow into difficult, aggressive individuals after puberty.

Foxes are wild, undomesticated animals. They are not suitable for keeping in apartments because they need large, open spaces. Most of them do not learn to relieve themselves in a specific place, and their droppings emit a very intense, unpleasant smell to humans. After puberty, aggression also appears, which is dangerous for the environment.

It is very difficult to create the right conditions for foxes to live in captivity. The aviary, apart from being of the right size, must be escape-proof and built of durable, expensive materials.

In recent years, there have been more and more reports from people wanting to get rid of a fox that destroys everything, meaning income, and is aggressive towards household members. Facilities that have the right conditions for these animals are constantly overcrowded, so owners release foxes into the forest, where they, as animals not taught to live in nature, fall victim to hunger, road accidents, or are killed by people.

What's more, fox puppies are usually sold by people who breed and kill animals for their fur. Of course, this fact is passed over in silence by the authors of the advertisements. It is an additional (unofficial) source of income for the farm, which increases the profitability of the fur industry - it is worth adding that it is not accepted by 70% of Polish society.

We want to change the current situation in which breeders and advertising portals benefit from the sale of foxes, and the entire costs of this phenomenon fall on animal protection organizations and the animals themselves, who pay with their enormous suffering and lives.

That is why we appeal to you not to place ads with foxes on your portal. The desire to care for an animal can be fulfilled in a responsible way by adopting a cat or a dog from a shelter. These are animals for whom it is much easier to create the right conditions and who have developed over generations the ability - and often the desire - to live with a human caregiver,

Lisi Azyl."

• Sign: Petition Against Promoting Foxes As Pets Online