When my family lived in Virginia (my dad was at law school), there was this lady named Jill Stenny who lived in our neighborhood. Of course, since I was a kid, and was raised in the south, I called her "Ms. Stenny." Anyways, Ms. Stenny was a nice lady and all that, but the weird/cool thing about her was that she had a pet fox. I've met lots of people who have pet wolves, or part wolf/part dogs, for pets, but Ms. Stenny is the only person I've ever known who had a fox. However, the reason for the rarity of pet foxes was perhaps abundantly clear from this case, if Ms. Stenny's fox was in any way normative. For Ms. Stenny's fox was not very nice. In fact, he bordered on being an unholy terror. He slept all day on Ms. Stenny's screen porch, but at night he would go out cavorting in the neighborhoor, toppling trash cans, fighting with (and often injuring) cats, and sending the dogs into a barking frenzy. Sometimes he even slipped into people's houses and "marked" his territory in a very unpleasant way. Little kids and some of the women were afraid to go outside at night, because even though a fox isn't very big, I think at some level people recognize foxes are wild animals, and that makes it a bit unsettling to know that it could watching your every move from under your car.
Eventually, a group of people from our block complained to the city about Ms. Stenny's fox, but it turned out that she actually had a license to keep it. So the situation remained that this fox was running roughshod over our neighborhood, and there was nothing we could do about it (if this had been farther south, I'm pretty sure someone would have taken matters--or at least a shotgun--into their own hands and solved the problem). So people--especially the men--on our block found themselves in a uncomfortable and helpless position. They would encounter Ms. Stenny's fox on their way home from work and all they could do was stare impotently and say, "bastard fox." The fox could turn around, spray piss at them, and their hands would be tied. We were under that little canine's thumb.
But I think Ms. Stenny empathized with us in some way--not enough to ditch the fox-- but enough to try to do what she could to maintain good relations. In fact, she went about this in a fairly straightforward way. She hooked up some loudspeakers to her car, and each morning as she would drive out of the neighborhood to go to work, she would sing to her neighbors in an attempt to ease the oppresion we all felt from her pet. I can still remember the song she would sing, as I lay in my bed in the dawn, listening. She sang:
"Don't be ruled by the fox that I've got,
I'm Jill, I'm Jill Stenny from the block."