RETIRED farmers Julia and Melvin Crabtree are counting the cost after an athletic fox raided their chicken pen.

The fox cleared a six-foot high fence to get among the chickens and would have killed them all had it not been disturbed.

The raid happened at about 2am last week when the fox attacked the chickens at Nudge Farm, Turner Lane, Addingham Moorside.

Mrs Crabtree said: "We built this great big pen about six or seven feet high. I did not think a fox could jump that high."

The family were alerted in the middle of the night by the gruesome sound of the fox chewing its way through one of the chickens it killed. Mrs Crabtree said: "We had three dogs outside and they never barked at all. We went out and all the floodlights were on. It was so upsetting to see it."

By the time Mr and Mrs Crabtree and their son, Oliver ,turned on the lights, two chickens and a cockerel had been killed. The other three chickens in the pen were deeply traumatised by the experience.

But Mrs Crabtree said she had been luckier than a neighbour whose farm lost 13 chickens when what is believed to have been the same fox got into the hen house in the middle of the night.

"It was just a horrible sight," said Mrs Crabtree. And another farmer she knew living near Chelker Reservoir had lost a goose to a fox, she added.

People living on the Moorside blamed the fox for the demise of all the feral cats in the area and other wildlife. Mrs Crabtree thinks that it must be a hungry vixen with a litter to feed.

She said: "Nothing hardly lives on the Moorside now because the fox has killed everything."

She said previously the feral cats kept down the numbers of rats and mice on farms.

Mrs Crabtree said she was a supporter of fox hunting to control fox numbers and stop them proliferating. "I like to see the hounds and the fox has a good chance to get away," she said.

She is also hoping that the fox which killed her chickens could be hunted down by local hunters and shot before it kills other people's animals.

Already ten times as many foxes are shot each year in Britain than hunted to death with hounds and horses. Opponents of fox hunting on the grounds that it is cruel say that specific problems caused by foxes can be solved humanely by shooting by a trained marksman.

The Countryside Alliance - a lobby group which supports hunting - says that it is less cruel than shooting. Hunting, they say, not only kills one fox, but disperses others.

They also say that in previous periods when foxhunting did not take place, such as during the Second World War, the fox population went down because farmers took to shooting them all.

But Alex Ross, from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said: "We believe fox hunting is cruel and unnecessary. If there is a problem with a fox, a skilled marksman is the only answer."