vulpicide

plural vulpicides · alternative vulpecide

1. countableSomeone who kills foxes other than by hunting them with hounds.

   Some of the foxes found dead on railway lines, by the way, have been put there after death by vulpicides.

   1910, Owen Jones, Marcus Woodward, A gamekeeper's note-book

   1 more example

   ‘Seven months I've been worriting my guts out in London, and all on the off-chance of getting a seat in the office of that sanctimonious old vulpicide.’

   1928, Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Penguin, published 2013, page 121

2. countableuncountableThe killing of a fox.

   Prove by the rules of Aristotle “that vulpicide is murder,” and is punishable accordingly by the laws of Squirearchy.

   1868, Francis Trevelyan Buckland, Curiosities of Natural History

   2 more examples

   […]he who brought in the head of a wolf or a fox was entitled to a reward, for the crime of vulpicide, so justly odious in the nineteenth century, was actually encouraged in the dark ages!

   1846 July 28, The Foreign Quarterly Review, number 74

   Nowhere is the crime of vulpicide more odious. An ardent sportsman, not many years since, is said at some public meeting to have thus tersely expressed himself:—‘Sir, I believe that a man who would kill a fox would kill his own father.’ This may appear strong language, but it shows the detestation in which the offence is held.

   1862, The Quarterly Review, volume 111, number 222