We’re still not 100% sure why these Yellowknife foxes look like this

Many months after they were first noticed around Yellowknife, there’s still no firm explanation for why some of the city’s foxes have such a peculiar appearance.

We do, however, have some new opinions from scientists who study this kind of thing closely.

In September 2024, wildlife watchers shared photos of a strange-looking fox with a shorter coat and bigger ears than normal.

Residents offered explanations ranging from a fox-coyote hybrid to a jackal or even Anubis, the Egyptian god said to have acted as a guide to the underworld.

At the time, the NWT’s Department of Environment and Climate Change said the fox was likely just a regular red fox with a coat that would get fluffier as winter approached.

But winter came and went, and photos of foxes with sparse coats kept popping up.

Eventually, a video of two such foxes playing together proved that more than one of the animals has been running around town.

ECC says it isn’t actively investigating the cause of these foxes’ irregular coats. Doing so, the department said, would require that the animals be live-trapped so biopsies could be completed and hair, tissue, or blood samples collected.

“Given that these foxes appear otherwise healthy and there is no immediate conservation concern, the stress and potential harm associated with capture currently outweigh any benefits of attempting to confirm a diagnosis,” said a spokesperson.

Mange or skin infection isn’t thought likely, the department believes, because the foxes don’t have patchy hair loss, inflammation or poor body condition. ECC instead thinks the foxes could be Samson foxes, a recessive genetic trait first documented in Finland that prevents a fox’s longer guard hairs from growing, while causing its underfur to take on a woolly appearance.

‘It’s so weird’

That isn’t the only possible explanation, though.

As far back as 1932, a condition named hypotrichosis has turned up in populations like Icelandic Arctic foxes.

According to a 2007 paper by Pall Hersteinsson – The naked fox: hypotrichosis in Arctic foxes – hypotrichosis and the condition that creates Samson foxes have many similar traits. They differ in that hypotrichosis can be transmitted between adult foxes.

Hersteinsson has since passed away. Cabin Radio turned to Audrey Moizan and Chloé Warret-Rodrigues Junior, veterinarians who work on the Churchill Fox Project.

Moizan is a PhD student studying demographic patterns and scavenger activities among foxes in Churchill, Manitoba. Warret-Rodrigues is a post-doctoral student who has studied the presence of red foxes in the area.

“It’s so weird, actually,” said Warret-Rodrigues while examining photos of Yellowknife’s short-coated foxes.

The pair said they had never seen anything like it – and it would require testing to diagnose the foxes with certainty.

They, like ECC, feel the condition is likely genetic and not parasitic, since diseases like mange would cause a patchier coat.

“You would see them with wounds because it’s sometimes itchy,” said Moizan.

“When you have [mange], it’s on the tail, it’s on the paw, it’s on the ears. You have localization … but here it’s kind-of all over the place.”

“Same thing with fungi, you get a pattern,” agreed Warret-Rodrigues.

Moizan said if the issue is not genetic, it could be congenital. A congenital condition is present at the time of birth, the veterinarians explained, and can sometimes be a spontaneous mutation that isn’t a hereditary condition.

Asked if the condition of these foxes might be worth investigating, Warret-Rodrigues said: “Fundamentally, that’s always interesting, because there is a phenomenon going on there from a conservation perspective.”

Both ECC and the veterinarians think the foxes were able to survive the winter because food – both the likes of easy-to-hunt ptarmigan and food discarded by humans – is so readily available in Yellowknife. The animals may have been able to find warm spots close to buildings that gave them shelter from the cold.

Warret-Rodrigues and Moizan expressed no real concern for the condition spreading beyond Yellowknife, since foxes who inherit these traits may not survive in less urban areas.