The fox that ate the scraps
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The fox that ate the scraps is a resident of the Baja California resort where John Kiriakou filmed in October 2025, and the subject of a viewer question he had promised to return to and then forgotten.

The cook's arrangement

The animal had an established role in the kitchen's waste management. "The cook at the resort told us not to worry about not finishing dinner, because there was a fox that lived on the grounds, and the fox would just eat our scraps."

The complication

The arrangement had a downside, and it was located precisely where he could least afford one. "The fox would always poop right where I come out to go to my mini fridge every freaking night. And so these poor ladies had to clean up the poop."

The detail lands only if the mini fridge is understood: it stood outdoors, and reaching it at three in the morning already required shaking scorpions out of his shoes and carrying a flashlight to check the top of the appliance for tarantulas.

Identifying it

Asked by a viewer what species he had seen, Kiriakou described behaviour before appearance. "They run right in front of your car as they're trying to cross this dirt track. They had huge ears, which I had never seen before." Alongside them he saw "rabbits with these gigantic ears that are standing right up, they're like desert rabbits, or the desert hare or whatever", and accepted the host's correction that these were hares.

The foxes he placed by comparison with the two deserts he knows professionally. "It was a desert fox like you see in Sinai, or in Afghanistan. They're very small. They're grey, and they only come out at night."

When a viewer suggested a fennec, and an image was produced on screen, Kiriakou declined to claim expertise and then accepted the identification: "I'm not a fox connoisseur", followed by "yeah, that's it. That's it."

The Afghan comparison

The reference point is a memory from deployment. Asked earlier in the same programme whether Afghanistan had been more comfortable than Baja, Kiriakou said he had seen a snake there but "hundreds of foxes": "desert foxes. They come out of their dens when the sun goes down. You can see their eyes shining off in the distance." He added that they are not dangerous, and that there were marmots in both places, "they had marmots down there in Baja as well. Saw dozens of them."

See also

- The resort with no air conditioning
- The tarantula on the mini fridge
- Where He Slept In Afghanistan
