POOR little Dennie Dolan, the London baby whose finger was bitten off by a fox.

Yes, it IS horrible and I can see why his mum and dad, Hayley Cawley and Paul Dolan, are angry and afraid; the fox was actually trying to drag Dennie away.

But the reaction of the usual suspects to this incident has been ridiculous.

To listen to commentators like London Mayor Boris Johnson and the otherwise estimable Peter Oborne, you’d think a vulpine plague was roaming the streets, looking for babies to feast on.

Get a grip, people!

In the last ten years there have been just six recorded fox attacks on children.

If it’s real harm we’re concerned about – not just reigniting the absurd fox-hunting debate – then the animals we should perhaps be culling are dogs.

Last year there were more than 6,000 hospital admissions for dog bites, up roughly 2,000 on the year before.

Around one in six hospital admissions following a dog attack involved a child under 10. Data shows these victims were more likely to suffer serious facial injuries requiring plastic surgery. Worse still, it’s believed that this is merely the tip of the canine iceberg.

But of course we’re not going to cull dogs because the vast majority of them are well behaved with responsible owners and killing them on the off-chance would be cruel and pointless.

And so it is with foxes. If Boris is so concerned about urban foxes why doesn’t he do something about the filthy habits of his London electorate who appear to think the streets are the correct place to dispose of all the half-eaten kebabs, pizzas and horseburgers they’ve got tired of consuming?

Why doesn’t he make like France and instate daily bin collections? And the same goes for all the other towns and cities which claim they have a fox problem.

If you know anything about foxes you’ll know that if they are culled out of existence the towns and cities where this happens will be overrun with something much, much nastier. Rats.

And, even worse than rats, foxes and dogs, there is another creature which is preying on our young. This species kills a child in Britain every ten days.

Every two weeks it kills a human baby. Each year, on average 56 children die at its hands.

This evil species is, of course, us. Human beings.

If anything should provoke a hysterical response it is these statistics which should shock us to the core. They should prompt a tidal-wave of action and riots in the streets.

But they don’t.

Because it’s far easier to tut-tut and talk about blasting foxes to death with a shotguns than it is to tackle the horror that is taking place every week in ordinary family homes and about which we seem almost unable to do a thing.