Richmond, Virginia wildlife center staff dress up as a fox to care for rescued kit

Patrick Smith is a London-based editor and reporter for NBC News Digital.

A wildlife center has developed a way of stopping an abandoned newborn red fox from becoming too used to humans: By feeding it wearing a fox mask. The Richmond Wildlife Center in Richmond, Virginia, shared a video of the center's founder, Melissa Stanley, feeding milk to the tiny female kit — the term for a juvenile fox — while wearing the mask in an attempt to prevent imprinting, where animals form a strong bond shortly after birth with the first other animal it receives care from.

The center's mask video echoed a scheme from a wildlife sanctuary in China in 2022, where workers dressed in panda outfits smeared with bear faeces and urine in an attempt to erase the memory of human contact from the captive pandas. The center in Virginia used the incident to raise awareness of the dangers of rabies. The people who found the fox handled it with bare hands, and the center warned that this put both the finder and the animal in danger.

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