Not listed in CITES Appendices at species level. V. v. necator in the Sierra Nevada, California, USA, is rare, possibly declining (Nowak 1991). The subspecies griffithi, montana and pusilla (=leucopus) are listed as CITES – Appendix III (India).

Present in most temperate-subarctic conservation areas with the exception of some inaccessible islands in the Old World and South America. Widely regarded as a pest and unprotected. Most countries and/or states where trapping or hunting occurs have regulated closed versus open seasons and restrictions on methods of capture. In the European Union, Canada, and the Russian Federation, trapping methods are regulated under an agreement on international trapping standards between these countries, which was signed in 1997. Other countries are signatories to ISO/DIS 10990-5.2 animal (mammal) traps, which specifies standards for trap testing.

Foxes are highly persecuted and heavily hunted in Afghanistan, however, it is an adaptable species that produces large litters. Therefore the Government of Afghanistan has listed V. vulpes as a harvestable species (with regular monitoring of populations to ensure hunting does not qualify the fox for a protected status in the future).

In Europe and North America, hunting traditions and/or legislation impose closed seasons on fox hunting. In the UK and a few other European countries, derogation from these provisions allows breeding season culling for pest-control purposes. Here, traditional hunting ethics encouraging restrained "use" may be at odds with harder hitting pest-control ambitions. This apparent conflict between different interest groups is particularly evident in the UK, where fox control patterns are highly regionally variable (Macdonald et al. 2003). In some regions, principal lowland areas where classical mounted hunting operates, limited economic analyses suggest that the principal motive for these communal fox hunts is as a sport – the number killed is small compared with the cost of the hunting. In these regions, most anthropogenic mortality is by individual farmers shooting foxes. The mounted communal hunts do exhibit restraint – hunting takes place for a limited season, and for a prescribed number of days per week. Elsewhere, in upland regions, communal hunting by foot with guns and dogs may make economic sense, depending on the number of lambs lost to foxes (data on this is poor), and also on the current value of lost lambs. This type of fox hunting may also be perceived as a sport by its participants.

An individual deciding whether or not to control foxes, and by what means, has a complex set of factors to consider, including other interest groups, practicality and economics. For some farmers, there is evidence that a decision to control foxes may be economically perverse. Macdonald et al. (2003) modelled the interactions between foxes, rabbits, and rabbit-induced crop damage. For some farmers at least, a decision to kill a fox may, in some circumstances, cost that farmer a significant amount of crop loss to the rabbits that the fox and its descendants would have killed.

In addition to fur farms, Red Foxes are widely kept in small wildlife parks and zoos, but there appears to be no systematic data on their breeding success. Being extremely shy they are often poor exhibits.