Thurber's aim in this text is to satirize political language which is used to justify reprehensible actions, in this case the attack of one community by another, leading to the extermination of the weaker of the two.
             Using a mixture of elements from fairy tale and fable, Thurber draws a seemingly humorous moral from his story. His message is, however, quite serious : we must not let one community aggress another purely in its own interest.
             We have the whole text in front of us, and so we can see how it functions. "Once upon a time" is the classical opening of a fairy tale and by using the terms "sanctuary", "happily" and "refuge", Thurber indicates that here is a kind of paradise for the inhabitants, who are birds.
             In the third sentence, the coming conflict is announced by the words "protested", "arbitrary" and "unnatural" with reference to the fence protecting the birds. These words are used by a community of foxes, and so we are now in a familiar fable context, where animals speak and reason. Foxes are of course predators, and the word "pack", whih is usually only used to describe animals who hunt in groups (wolves, hounds) characterizes them as belligerent. Moreover, foxes are traditionally portrayed as intelligent and this makes them all the more dangerous in this context.
             The final result is already suggested by the use of the verb "to civilize" which is shown by Thurber to be a synonym for "to eat" as far as the foxes are concerned... When the foxes start to prepare their attack on the birds, they use classical justifications. First, they mention a historical argument (there used to be foxes in the sanctuary). Then a geographical one (the birds should live somewhere else), and finally a manifestly false political one (the birds are a threat to world peace).
             At the beginning of the second paragraph, the absolute indifference of the foxes to outside pressure is underlined by the word "so", which normally points to a
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