Woman uses foxes as therapy animals to help domestic abuse survivors
WeirdNews
She rescued eight foxes from fur farms
(Web Desk) - A woman who rescued eight foxes from fur farms that now sleep in a twin-size bed in her home now uses them as therapy foxes in women’s shelters and youth rehabilitation programmes and claims many “resonate” with the foxes’ “story of survival”.
Nicole Navarro, 43, who works part-time on a tourist boat and lives in Key Largo, Florida, with her eight foxes, Libby, Louie, Reef, Kai, Coral, Jasper, Ridley and Penny, began rescuing the animals in 2020 after she got laid off in the pandemic.
Nicole says all of her foxes were “deemed undesirable” by fur farmers, as they had “some sort of physical defect”, such as missing tails or toes, but claims this is what “ended up saving their lives”.
Nicole’s foxes have 24/7 access to a room in her house, with luxuries such as air conditioning and a bed, as well as a huge enclosure outside with “enrichment activities”, and Nicole spends most of her days off playing with them, and feeding them their diet of chicken, duck, rabbit and turkey, which costs 800 dollars (£625) a month.
At the end of 2022, Nicole began using them as therapy foxes, where she puts them in a harness, allows people to stroke them and tells the foxes’ stories of going from being bred to kill to living a happy life, which she finds “extremely rewarding” as she has “experienced intense trauma” in her past.
Nicole said: “When I take the foxes to the sessions, I find that the people really resonate with the foxes’ story of survival.
“Often these people are victims of domestic abuse and in a way, have been in a similar position.”
Nicole first fell in love with foxes in 2018 when she was volunteering at the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office in Key West, Florida, which had an animal farm.
She explained: “In 2018, two foxes were surrendered and even though I had a lot of experience with different species of animals throughout my life, I grew up on a very large horse farm in western Pennsylvania, I had never had up close personal experience with foxes.
“And I just sort of became completely infatuated with the species and then started learning more about their backgrounds – most foxes here in the United States can be traced back to fur farming and it’s illegal to capture, obviously, wild animals out of the wild and turn them into pets.”
From then on, Nicole started contacting fox rescue centres throughout America about potentially rescuing them in the future, and in March 2020, one of her contacts asked her if she was ready to take some foxes that were being surrendered from a fur farm.
She said: “I quickly scrambled to raise money because at that time, the Florida Keys completely shut down since we’re tourism based so I got laid off, and it became a bit of a lockdown project.”
