Fox Steals 100 Shoes In Berlin

“Why did the fox steal my shoes?” sounds like the start of a brain-teasing riddle or an annoyingly viral song. But for people in Berlin, it was an existential question spurred by the knowledge that a local fox was the culprit behind a string of shoe thefts. 

About two weeks ago, Christian Meyer, a resident of Berlin’s Zehlendorf neighborhood, noticed that one of his new and expensive running shoes had disappeared from his porch, and he decided to investigate the theft, German news site Tagesspiegel reported.  

Meyer quickly learned that he was not the thief’s only victim, and a tip helped him catch the fox bandit red-handed (or red-pawed) with two blue flip-flops in its mouth, according to Tagesspiegel. Days later, Meyer spotted the fox again; he followed it into a thicket, where Meyer crawled around for close to an hour. There, he discovered the fox’s secret stash of more than 100 shoes, “most of them just gnawed on a little,” Tagesspiegel reported.