When I was a kid, my dad brought a fox pup home. The mom had been caught in someone's trap and killed so he took one of the pups home to raise. For the first few days, it was kept in the porch until it could get acclimated but after that, she was free to go anytime she wanted to. She was raised pretty much like a dog, and she acted like a dog on amphetamines. We had two dogs at the time. The younger one played with the fox sometimes but mostly ignored it. Our older dog hated the fox, I think, but mostly because she would tease poor Wags all the time, wanting him to play with her. Wags was about fifteen years old at the time and not very interested in playtime with a fox. So the fox would run circles around him until he got mad enough to chase. Once she ran into the culvert and while Wags was barking at the culvert after her, she came out the other side, and yipped at her from behind.
When I came home from school, the fox would be waiting for the bus sometimes, and come running, jumping up on me like she couldn't wait for me to get home. Mom never let any of the animals in the house, but the fox would sneak in if someone was too slow getting to the door and run through the house.
She stuck around for around two years. Eventually, she started wandering at night, coming home before morning. Then, some days we wouldn't see her at all. She started becoming less sure of herself around people. She was never mean, but I would have to coax her to come to me, and eventually she wouldn't come to me anymore, and would be gone for days at a time. Gradually, she was acclimating herself to the life she was intended to have, as a fox.
More than a year since we had seen her last, we pulled into the driveway one night to see a fox running from the dog food bowl, so we figured she would come around from time to time for a free meal, and the dogs still viewed her as a rather annoying part of the family. Interestingly, we had chickens at the time, and she never bothered the chickens. We made sure they were penned in, so as not to tempt her but she seemed not to be so interested in them. The cats, by the way, never accepted the fox as part of the family. But then, they weren't so fond of the dogs either.
Also as a kid, I have had a couple of raccoons at different times, and the experience was pretty much the same. They were very tame and fun to have for a year or so but, as they grew into adults, they would gradually transform themselves into what they were intended to be. The raccoons were pretty much like cats only, because they were unable to retract their claws, there would be some accidents. One of my raccoons seemed to want to look me in the face when he talked to me, so he would just climb on up to face level, and it didn't matter to him that I might be wearing short pants. Ouch.
