In the Lair of the Fox Lady

Sounds like she has created a wonderful world. :)
Meet the woman who coached the animal stars of The Fox and the Child

Marie-Noëlle Baroni is telling me how important it is to win the trust of her animals when two unexpected visitors join us in her bizarre but cosy home – a former refrigerated lorry container in the south of France. First, a fawn peers through the door and hesitantly walks in. This is Bambou – found in the forest a few months ago and brought to Baroni, who fed him with a baby’s bottle.

Bambou is followed by Ratus, a raccoon who zigzags around, making a craaw-craaw noise. “He’s crying – he doesn’t want to go to bed on his own,” Baroni translates. To my amazement, Ratus shuffles up to the fawn, stands up on his hind legs and gives him a hug around the neck, as well as a cross between a snuffle and a kiss. “He wants Bambou to put him to bed,” Baroni exclaims delightedly.
A lively, fast-talking and birdlike blonde, she lives at the centre of a DIY private zoo created on 10 acres in the countryside. “We live penned in with animals. I can always see them from the windows and they can see me,” says Baroni, 42, who is married with six grown-up children. The stars of her vast menagerie in St-Rémy-de-Provence are half a dozen foxes that feature in a new film called The Fox and the Child, made by Luc Jacquet, who directed the worldwide hit March of the Penguins.

It is a touching, fable-like story about a girl who befriends a fox and features a voiceover by Kate Winslet. In the film, the young heroine, played by Bertille Noël-Bruneau, sees her first fox and decides to track it down and tame it. It leads her into a secret world of mountain peaks, forests and a cavern, where dangers include a bear and a lynx. The film should shake all those who consider foxes vermin. Read the whole story here