Tag: foxes

https://vine.co/v/imnx0grd3uM/embed/simple//platform.vine.co/static/scripts/embed.js

why-animals-do-the-thing:

applepuke:

icelandic-stripper-boots:

monkeysaysficus:

muddled-thought:

monkeysaysficus:

What the ever loving fuck?

Why do they sound like someone’s vehicle has a fucked ignition?

Did someone flood these foxes engines?

^^^ exactly my thoughts

fun fact! red foxes make this sound when they have meet their perfect mate or soul mate would you have it! so basically they’re just screaming for all the other red foxes that they have found their love and for all the others to fuck off

@why-animals-do-the-thing can you confirm the last comment? I’ve been wondering about this for literally months and I can’t find a source that gives me a straight answer.

“Foxes do this when they meet soul mates”: definitely not. It sounds cute, but endless anthropomorphism. 

This looks like conflict resolution in a tense situation, to me. Actually fighting is really detrimental to most animals so anything except dire conflict is resolved with vocalizations and threat postures instead of actual aggression. That’s what this looks like – a type of stereotyped (ritualized) conflict. 

At first, this looks like aggression, due to the posture, the sound, and the body language of both animals. It’s really hard to tell at first what this is because the vine loops every 3 seconds or so and there’s really no extra information. 

@cybervulprince tagged us in a comment looking for a response to this vine that actually did a great job breaking it down:

it looks more like aggressive or play behavior to me. it makes me think of the thing cats do where they just glare at each other and sort of lazily, slowly bat at each other until one eventually pounces, but those foxes look super tense and fluffed-up and have their ears back which makes me think aggression.

That sort of stiff posture is almost always indicative of stressful situations in animal interactions. In dogs, we call it a ‘freeze’ It’s hard to see if this is a full freeze because foxes are so fluffy and the vine is so short, but that’s basically what we’re looking at. Open mouth behavior is also always part of conflict or threat behaviors. Animal don’t have to open their mouths like this to vocalize, so it’s a point to note that it shows off their teeth. They’re also opened with tight, stiff lips, which we know reflects interactions that are more stressful. 

So we can tell something tense is going on here, but why do the foxes make this noise? Here’s a sort clip of a red fox scream. While both sexes can and do scream, it’s normally a sound made by female foxes. It can indicate fear and often is used to define territory and fend of rival foxes during the mating season. (It seems to be a myth that foxes scream during sex – most of what I can find says that it’s common during the mating season, but more as a territorial behavior than a copulatory vocalization. Copulatory vocalizations tend to sound very different and carry much farther because they exist for very specific evolutionary reasons relating to sperm competition. Yes, in humans too). 

What mostly confirms for me that this is a ritualized way of resolving a tense situation without conflict, though, is a vine on the content creator’s vine account that was uploaded to the same account shortly after the one that went viral. It looks like it as taken almost immediately afterwards. In it, the postures of the animals has changed – one fox is much lower now, in an appeasement posture, and the other is crouched so that it can lean over the lower fox (weigh placement is a very important part of conflict resolution in most animals, because it determines what behaviors you’re able to do quickly if it escalates). In another video on the account, it looks like there are at least five foxes in close proximity in the same enclosure, so it’s understandable that you’d have social interactions and different aggression issues going on between that many individuals. 

Tl;dr: Screaming foxes are aggression/conflict resolution, not soulmate bond anthropomorphic nonsense that the internet thinks is funny and doesn’t fact check.