The prickly truth: hedgehogs face a struggle to survive

No wild animal is closer to the hearts of the British than the hedgehog. In poll after poll, it has been voted our favourite mammal. This is hardly surprising. Hedgehogs naturally inspire affection. Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, the companionable washerwoman created by Beatrix Potter, is only the most celebrated of a whole host of them who trot and snuffle through our national imagination. They are familiar to us in a way that few other wild creatures are. They can be met in fields and gardens, in hedgerows and parks. To see one is to feel the tug of a fascination with the natural world as a whole. In the words of Hugh Warwick, the naturalist who serves hedgehogs as their great contemporary champion: ‘These are precious creatures to be treated with great respect.’

Over recent decades, however, we have not been treating them with great respect. An animal that was once ubiquitous seems on the brink of extinction. The most recent survey of hedgehog numbers in Britain, issued last month, was widely reported as good news. This was on the basis that populations in towns and cities seem to have stabilised, or perhaps even to be recovering. But beyond built-up areas hedgehog numbers continue to plummet. In certain parts of the country – East Anglia most notably – the population decline since 2000 has been 75 per cent. Since the second world war, Warwick estimates, it has been 90-95 per cent. Children are growing up who may never see a hedgehog in their entire lives.

It is not sentimentality to mourn this. Hedgehogs are precious in and of themselves; but they are also precious as bellwethers. A countryside unable to sustain hedgehogs is a countryside that is sick. It is no coincidence that the decline in their numbers should have begun during the second world war, when agriculture was expanded on an industrial scale.