It began at midnight: a six-hour police stakeout to catch the shoe-loving thieves who had pilfered 40 pairs of sandals from a neighbourhood in Japan.
Finally, the officers found the main suspects: a pair of sly foxes.
“I can’t believe that foxes stole my sandals,” a resident, 36, told the Mainichi newspaper.
Police began their investigation after receiving reports of footwear mysteriously disappearing from eight households in Nagaokakyo, in the greater Kyoto region, about 235 miles (380km) west of Tokyo.
Five police officers were involved in the stakeout in the early hours of 20 May. This culminated in the discovery of two foxes in the garden of an empty house, with 40 pairs of shoes scattered around a burrow, the Mainichi reported.
Kyoto city zoo’s chief, Naoki Yamashita, speculated that the foxes “could have been building a burrow to breed and collected the sandals out of their instinct to stock up on food and other items”.
Police have reportedly issued a warning to local residents to keep their shoes inside their homes to prevent any further disappearances.
The Nagaokakyo animals are not the first shoe-stealing foxes. In 2009, authorities in the small western German town of Föhren said a fox was responsible for stealing more than 100 shoes.
The journalist Peter Beaumont wrote an article for the Observer in 2013 on his battle with foxes near his home in north London.
“One morning I came down to find seven shoes ranging in size from that of a toddler to an adult trainer sitting in the middle of the lawn, none of them a pair,” he wrote.
In 2014, a resident in Farlington, Portsmouth, reported finding more than 50 shoes along a path near a fox den. Those responsible seemed to prefer trainers and work boots, the resident said at the time.
