47. VIC THE DOG AND HER FOX CUBS

JAN BONDESON shares another deltiological discovery from his prodigious collection of postcards. This month’s pictorial blast from the past is a unique record of the once common custom of using dogs to nurse orphaned fox cubs

The postcard reproduced here shows a terrier called Vic, said to have been well known in Pytchley, Northamptonshire, and its surroundings, suckling four fox cubs. Most dogs (or humans) addressed as ‘Vic’ are of the male sex, but this could hardly be true in the present case; perhaps Vic was short for ‘Victoria’? This 1906 postcard, from a photograph of the curious Northamptonshire canine taken by the Seckington studio for the Rugby Press, is indeed a most remarkable sight. Vic’s purported local fame did not make her a newspaper celebrity, and online sources provide no source as to the identity of her owner, or to the ultimate fate of either Vic herself or the fox cubs she had helped to nourish. It remains a fact that in Victorian and Edwardian…

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Fortean Times (Digital) - 1 Issue, 450

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