WORLDWIDE—For 34-year-old Amy Rousseau, the uneasy realization came as she casually flipped through a National Geographic article on the American red fox in her dentist's waiting room several months ago.

"Nothing! Everything's FINE!" she shouted, visibly flustered, as she slammed the magazine shut, quickly lit it on fire, and then drop-kicked the flaming mess out the 10th-floor window. "The trivia on red fox hunting habits was really—uh, it was just a little too fascinating for me. That's all."

"Okay, OKAY, and I was a tiny bit aroused by the photos," she mumbles.

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A new study out today suggests Rousseau is not alone. A whole generation of women have been inexplicably conditioned from childhood to find the common American red fox sexually appealing, and the phenomenon can be directly traced back to the fox that played the titular character in the 1973 Disney film Robin Hood.

"Who's to say if it was his smoldering bedroom eyes, the gentle British lilt in his voice, or his hours of joyful pants-less frolicking," the study's opening paragraph begins. "But god damn it, that fox was hot as hell. That's not the subjective opinion of anyone on this research team, but rather a straight-up empirical and unassailable scientific fact."

Worldwide, women now in their 30s and 40s are forced to work around their complicated and deeply inconvenient relationship with Vulpes vulpes.

"We assume that's Latin for 'hubba hubba'," page 902 of the study reads.

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When 36-year-old Hannah McMaster landed a job at the San Diego Zoo last year, she enjoyed several months of deeply satisfying work—until her manager reassigned her to the fox pavilion.

"Did I often forget to feed the animals entrusted to my care because I was constantly daydreaming about the dad fox leaping up, expertly firing several arrows that pierced the netted ceiling of his enclosure, taking my hand and leading me into a meadow of wildflowers where we'd have a romantic picnic and gaze into each other's eyes as he serenaded me on the lute?"

"No, YOU did," she stammers, her eyes welling up with the tears of an emotionally and sexually tortured soul.

"I work at a bank now," McMaster whispers. "It's just better this way. It's just better for everyone."

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