Thieving fox amasses 120 shoes

A vixen has stolen more than 120 shoes from doorsteps in the German town of Föhren over the last year, amassing a collection that would impress even Imelda Marcos. Little bite marks on the laces suggest they're intended as toys for her cubs.

For more than a year, the people of Föhren, a small town in the wooded Eifel hills of western Germany, wondered who was going around stealing shoes from their doorsteps and garden terraces at night. Well over 100 muddy hiking shoes, wet Wellingtons, steel-capped workman's boots, flipflops and old slippers went missing.
The mystery has now been solved after a forestry worker discovered an Imelda Marcos-scale collection of footwear in a fox's den in nearby woods.



The bushy-tailed culprit, believed to be a vixen with a family of cubs, is still at large, and locals have two explanations for her kleptomania. Either she amassed them as toys for her children, or she simply likes collecting shoes, or both. So far 120 stolen shoes have been retrieved.

"She's clearly got a thing about shoes," Rudolf Reichsgraf von Kesselstatt, the local count who lives in Föhren Palace, said. "We found 86 shoes in the den and a further 32 in a nearby quarry where they like to play. That includes 12 or 13 matching pairs of shoes."

"The shoes may well be intended as toys for the cubs because there are bite marks made by little teeth on the shoelaces," he continued. "It's impressive that she found the time to steal them in addition to getting food." Count von Kesselstatt had the retrieved shoes laid out in the palace on Wednesday so that the townsfolk can come and collect them.