Jolyon Maugham QC got up early on Boxing Day morning, put on his wife’s satin kimono, went into his garden and bludgeoned a fox to death with a baseball bat.
He then announced what he had done on Twitter.
There is no mystery about why he killed the fox. It had come to eat his chickens, which he keeps in his central London garden. It became trapped in the chicken-netting. Rather than try to disentangle it or call the RSPCA, he killed it with the baseball bat that he keeps at home, mainly to deter intruders.
I doubt that he relished the task of killing the fox, and he tweeted, again infelicitously, that he “did not especially enjoy killing it.”
It is quite possible that he acted in the heat of the moment and from the most compassionate of motives. A fox entangled and struggling in wire netting is likely to be in great pain and distress.
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