Foxes and the law

Last reviewed 25 August 2026. This is a description of the law, not legal advice.

The fox is not a protected species

It is worth being exact, because the fox is often assumed to be either fully protected or entirely unprotected and it is neither. There is no close season for foxes, no licence is needed to kill one, and the fox appears on no schedule of protected animals. What restricts killing a fox is how, not whether:

• The Wild Mammals (Protection) Act 1996 makes it an offence to mutilate, kick, beat, impale, stab, burn, crush, drown, drag or asphyxiate any wild mammal with intent to inflict unnecessary suffering.
• Hunting a wild mammal with dogs is prohibited in three of the four nations — see below.
• Snaring is separately regulated and the four nations have diverged sharply; that comparison is on the law by nation grid.
• Firearms law governs shooting, and the Animal Welfare Act 2006 applies the moment a fox is taken into anyone's care.

Hunting with dogs: three nations out of four

• England and Wales. The Hunting Act 2004 makes it an offence to hunt a wild mammal with a dog except where the hunting is exempt under Schedule 1. Trail hunting — following a laid scent rather than an animal — is not hunting a wild mammal and so falls outside the Act; what that means in practice is set out on the trail hunting page.
• Scotland. The Hunting with Dogs (Scotland) Act 2023 came into force on 3 October 2023, repealing and replacing the Protection of Wild Mammals (Scotland) Act 2002. It imposes a limit of two dogs for any use of dogs in hunting, creates a licence scheme for using more than two in limited circumstances, and — unlike the position in England and Wales — expressly bans trail hunting.
• Northern Ireland. There is no ban. Northern Ireland is the only part of the United Kingdom where hunting a wild mammal with dogs remains lawful. A private member's Hunting with Dogs Bill has been introduced in the Assembly which would prohibit it, and would also cover trail hunting and terrier work; an earlier consultation on the proposal recorded 78.16 per cent of respondents in favour of a ban. It is a proposal and not law.

Scotland's Act is the one to read if you want to see what a legislature does after twenty years of enforcement difficulty: the two-dog limit and the explicit trail hunting ban are both directed at the gaps that made the 2002 Act hard to prosecute.