Family win legal fight to keep fox

A DORDOGNE family have won a long legal battle to keep a fox that they had saved after finding it beside its dead mother.

The fox, named Zouzou (pictured right), had been kept by Anne-Paule Delanes and husband Didier and raised from a cub at their home in Gardonne since they found it in 2010.

But in 2011 they were warned that it was a wild animal and that they faced a fine for keeping it at home.

Since then they have been fighting a series of legal battles to keep Zouzou – even hiding it from animal protection officers who had come to take it away.

Anne-Paule told Connexion at the time that the authorities were "trying to block us" from keeping Zouzou, who they thought was too domesticated to survive in the wild.

Now the Delanes family have received a certificate from the prefecture saying they can keep the red fox “until the end of its life”.

Anne-Paule told journalists there was no aggression from Zouzou, who will be four years old in March. She said Zouzou was “very cuddly, more so than a dog. When he sees us, he rolls around on the ground with small cries of joy."