Tanukitsune the Raccoon-Fox

the idea for this new little character was something that has been itching in the back of my head for a while. You see after I saw a real live fox playing on my front lawn at 2:47am (to say that they are very common in Britain especially in farming areas where I live, it was the first ever time I'd seen a living red fox so close), I got a sudden urge to draw a fox, but then I thought: 'way too many cartoony foxes, anthro foxes, fox-furries, anime foxes, kyubi kitsune aka nine-tailed foxes and 'sparkle-dog' style foxes on the internet' which wasn't what I wanted to go for, I wanted to make a unique kind of fox that's not ever been thought of before. A fox that's different but realistic not 'sparkle-dog' style...
That's when I remembered watching Pom Poko and learning about Tanuki aka Raccoon dogs. Tanukis really do fascinate me, so cute and 'lap dog' like that I found it very hard to believe that they are wild animals not pets, plus they do share a very big role in Japanese mythology just like Wolves and Foxes do (lol I do wonder where the myth about tanukis having magical testicles came from). And after I watched the tv documentary on the russian fox experiment I learnt how foxes CAN indeed come to look so insanely different from their natural appearances (surprisingly without any cross-breeding with say dogs, coyotes, wolves, etc) so I asked myself: any animal has the capability of having hybrid-offspring as long as they are members of the same family such as felidae and canidae etc (before anybody starts arguing about this animal-hybridization topic; ligers, wolfdogs, coyo-wolves, coyo-dogs, savana cats, and zebra-horses are living proof of the same-family logic) and compactible with each other's size (a tiger can't mate with a domestic cat because of the major size difference between them plus a tiger would most likely eat the smaller pet cat)...so what would an offspring of a fox and a tanuki look like?

And so, I created Tanukitsune, 'Tasu' for short. :D Tanukitsune would probably translate as 'raccoon fox' if in a kid's anime or manga, but I'm not Japanese nor exactly fluent in the language so I wouldn't know. You can find out more info about this artwork on my deviantart.com page: http://fav.me/d5oc2ne