Brussels railway station's raw chicken mystery solved

It was a mystery no-one could quite get their heads around. Every so often since last May, passengers using the Germoir train station in Brussels, halfway between Luxembourg and Etterbeek, would see pieces of raw chicken lying around on the platform. No-one could imagine why, or how they got there.

Until, by chance, Bruzz reporter Sam De Ryck spotted an elderly man dropping morsels of fresh chicken around the station. Like any intrepid reporter would, De Ryck approached the man, and this is what he found out.

The chicken-dropper is 81 years old and once came face to face with a fox, he explained. They looked each other in the eye. “He looked at me the way I was looking at him,” he said, which convinced him that the fox was an intelligent animal.

Foxes, in Brussels as elsewhere, often use railway lines to penetrate cities from the countryside without quite as much risk as the roads. They haunt cities in search of food, often from garbage bins.

The man, who would not provide his name, started putting out chicken for the foxes coming in on the line from the Sonian Forest. “I love all animals,” he told De Ryck. “Even flies. I wouldn't kill a fly. I let them live.”

Chickens, as one reader of the paper pointed out, are evidently another matter.

Photo: Jans Canon/Wikimedia