Nashville Songwriter Saves 60+ Foxes From Deadly Mange

Jerry Vandiver's songs have been recorded by Tim McGraw and Barbara Mandrell, but his most devoted fans now follow him for an entirely different reason: foxes.

The 78-year-old Nashville singer-songwriter has become the go-to rescuer for red foxes suffering from mange, a painful skin disease that's reached epidemic levels in Tennessee. Over the past seven years, he's logged thousands of volunteer hours trapping afflicted foxes and driving them to Walden's Puddle Animal Rescue for treatment.

Mange is caused by skin mites and leads to hair loss, painful rashes, and potentially deadly secondary infections. The good news? It's completely treatable if someone can catch the fox in time.

That's where Vandiver comes in. He wakes up at any hour to check traps in the woods, then makes the half-hour drive to the rescue center. In August alone, he logged 234 volunteer hours.

"I'm not the hero, I'm just the ambulance driver," Vandiver told the Tennessean. "Mange is treatable. If we can catch them, they can have a healthy, happy life."

His dedication has made him a local celebrity. When he started posting before-and-after videos of rescued foxes on his musician Facebook page, his followers jumped from 325 to 5,000. Concerned Nashville residents now regularly send him photos of sick foxes they've spotted.

The problem is getting worse. Walden's Puddle rehabilitated 44 red foxes in all of 2024, but by September 2025, they'd already treated more than 60.

The Ripple Effect

The surge in mange cases reveals a bigger environmental challenge. As suburban development shrinks fox habitats, different fox families are forced to share overlapping territories. These family groups, called "leashes," normally need several square miles of space to thrive.

Walden's Puddle believes this habitat loss is pushing foxes into closer contact, allowing the highly contagious disease to spread faster. Add in rat poison that weakens their immune systems, and the situation becomes critical.

The rescue center recommends residents avoid using poison, don't leave out food, and secure garbage containers tightly. Less human-provided food means foxes stay spread out in the wild, reducing disease transmission.

Vandiver monitors his neighborhood with trail cameras. When he spots a sick fox, he sets traps with bait and waits. He admits it's hard to ignore a single photo of a suffering animal, even at his age.

Staff at Walden's Puddle say he puts "foxes before himself," always. His reward comes when he releases a healed fox back into the woods and it looks back at him. Though he knows the fox is just checking for threats, he likes to imagine it's saying thank you.

Five thousand people are now watching a 78-year-old man prove that second acts can be just as meaningful as first ones.