Deer scratched/dead fox eaten

I had an interesting chat with a friend of a friend recently,here,s the account of what happened at his place last winter...In the last bit of snow we had,a farm worker Graham at T.farm in the north of the county was checking his arable fields,his stock were all barned up and saw a fallow deer in a very bad way.It,s neck was bleeding profusely and it had long,deep parallel scratches over it,s flanks and it,s back end looked like it had been chewed at,he raced back home ,got his rifle,found the poor beast in the same place and put it out of it,s misery.It hadn,t gone far.It was a mystery to him how the deer got to be like that.Offering no explanation he then went on to say,a few weeks later at lambing time there was a lambkilling fox that was shot in the act and while the carcase was in his yard waiting disposal,it disapeared.He found it in the bushes nearby and saw that it had been half eaten,again a mystery.I asked him if he had ever seen a bigcat on the 1000 acres there and he said not in the 10 years he had been there but another chap had,twice.It,s these bizarre things that go to adding to the big picture,strange occurences that don,t fit the normal cycle of life on a place.No British animal eats foxes for some reason,perhaps the flesh stinks,badgers don,t.A carcase left somewhere always rots down where it lies,in winter,with no maggots they seem mummified.Even wolves,who go out of their way to kill foxes in their area especially when they have cubs,just leave them where they were pulled down.But bigcats have been known to kill and eat foxes a lot in places like Africa,especially leopards.......