Kill badgers to save hedgehogs

Until last month I hadn’t seen a hedgehog for close to 30 years, though they were part of everyday life when I was a child. In the school holidays, we’d rush first thing to the nearby cattle grids to check for animals who’d fallen in overnight. It’s what passed for fun back then: picking damp critters out of concrete prisons.

Sometimes there were lambs, wedged in up to their woolly armpits; sometimes there were angry, pulsing toads. But it was hedgehog rescue that was our sacred duty. We’d pick them up in towels and take them to the hedgehog spa in the boiler room, where they’d spend the day lounging about eating chopped egg. Never feed a hedgehog milk. It gives them horrible diarrhoea.

That was the mid-1980s, and it was then that the hedgehog population began its steepest decline. By the mid-1990s, three quarters of what had once been an estimated population of 36 million had disappeared. In 2020, with fewer than a million left, they were declared at risk of extinction.

It was at that point that I put them in the mental box of things I choose not to think about, like bee decline and trafficked children. Roads are the biggest threat to hedgehogs and no one could or should ban cars. Nothing to be done. I resigned myself to not seeing a hedgehog again. I was wrong.

The first hog of the summer was one who fell on to the cover of my friend’s swimming pool. She appeared with him held in front of her on a dustpan and we gathered for a look. Most animals billed as cute are horrifying close up, their faces a mass of eyes or proboscises. This hedgehog was a beauty. He had silvery wings of fur around the eyes and a nose like a whippet.