- An adult hedgehog has around 5,000 inch-long spines on its back. They are being replaced continually - each spine lasts for about a year.
- Hedgehog was once viewed as a delicacy, particularly among gypsies. The animals would be coated in claw and baked; when the clay was removed, the spines came off with it.
- In 1981, Phillip Lewis decided to produce "hedgehog flavoured" crisps, getting him into trouble with hedgehog lovers who feared they were the real thing, and the Office of Fair Trading, who knew they were not.
- In 1986, the hedgehog population of North Ronaldsay, Orkney, was threatened with extermination. The animals were evacuated with the help of the Scottish Wildlife Trust, the local airline, and the island's residents.
Report from Chris Smith
A very prickly subject
Which is it the? A savage predator endangering rare birds, or a sweet wee thing?
By James Freeman in the Herald, 21 st December 2002
Mrs Tiggy-Winkle is 97; she is very unhappy. For Mrs T and her ilk, it is nothing short of war. The battle lines have been drawn, the sides have become entrenched. In the last week, the first fatal blow has been dealt and 5,000 lives hang in the balance: the lives of 5,000 hedgehogs.
On Wednesday, Scottish Natural Heritage took the controversial decision to cull the adult hedgehog population of the islands of North and South Uist and Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides. The animals were introduced to the islands in 1974, allegedly by a gardener who wanted to control slugs. Numbers have grown; one estimate says the current population will produce 10,000 young in 2003.
The hedgehog pose a threat to the islands' population of rare ground-breeding birds, including redshank, dunlin, snipe and ringed plover. Sterilising the animals was discussed but it was deemed that it would take too long. A final solution was necessary.
In April, when the hedgehog population emerges from hibernation, they face being caught in baited traps and taken to a "central handling facility" where they will be anaesthetised in "gas chambers" then given lethal injections.
This has acted like a call to arms for the nation's hedgehog supporters. An alliance has been formed between the British Hedgehog Preservation Society, which has 11,000 members, St Tiggywinkles wildlife hospital in Aylesbury, and Edinburgh-based Advocate for Animals. They have launched Operation Tiggywinkle, an ambitious scheme to rescue the hedgehogs from certain death and take them to a new life on the mainland. They say they have 2,000 volunteers ready to act.
SNH is prickly about this. It says the plan won't work, that the animals will die in transit, or die of starvation when forced to compete for food with the 1.5 million indigenous mainland hedgehogs which are used to thriving in a more competitive environment. The animals allies say SNH is guilty of a hedgehog holocaust, a needless slaughter of healthy animals. Les Stocker of St Tiggywinkles called it "a massacre of the innocents."
The gloves are off. It's feather versus spines. The birds are rare and need the remote breeding grounds of the Outer Hebrides to be relatively free of ground-based predators. On the other hand, the hedgehogs are only doing what comes naturally. Given their more usual fare of beetles, caterpillars and slugs, who would blame them for opting for scrambled eggs?
The RSPB - no doubts where their loyalties lie - have produced a video detailing the damning evidence of the hedgehog's guilt. While menacing music plays, the criminal snuffles his way up to the nest of an unsuspecting bird and gorges himself. It feels like a piece of Third Reich propaganda, a justification for ethnic cleansing.
There is something about the hedgehog which makes ordinary mild-mannered Brits take up arms. While there is little public protest on behalf of ferrets, mink, crows or even deer or badgers, all of which are culled regularly, since the first mention of a hedgehog cull, SNH has received 1,200 letters of protest.
Operation Tiggywinkle has been swamped with offers of help and money, including an offer of a privately owned plane to airlift the hedgehogs to safety.
There is no doubt about it, the hedgehog occupies a special place in the British consciousness.
Why else would perfectly sane people resort to the language of genocide when describing the fate of a small spikey animal which eats slugs? From Mrs Tiggy-Winkle top Sonic the Hedgehog, hedgehogs have seized our imagination, and held on to it with the force of millions of little spines.
Beatrix Potter played a seminal part in this when she wrote The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle in 1905, about a washer-woman who lived on a hillside, discovered by chance by a little girl, whose missing pocket handkerchiefs were returned immaculately washed and ironed. Of all Beatrix Potter's personifications of animals, Mrs Tiggy-Winkle is one of the most popular. Her name has passed into common speech, often applied to any hedgehog.
As with many of her drawings, Potter modelled Mrs Tiggy-Winkle on a real animal, her own pet Hedgehog, to whom she gave the same name. She wrote "So long as she can go to sleep on my knee she is delighted, but if she is propped up on end for half and hour, she first begins to yawn pathetically, and then she does bite! Nevertheless she is a dear person."
From that time on, few children's tales about animals were complete without a hedgehog.
Such was the case on both sides of the Atlantic, as Fuzzy-Peg in the enduring Brer Rabbit stories shows. Hedgehogs became a symbol of a pastoral idyll, a time of bounteous hedgerows and simple country folk, not unlike Tolkien's Shire.
Such are the hedgehogs in Walt Disney's adaptation of T. H. White's The Sword in the Stone. Industrious and peasant-like, with West Country accents, they send the young King Arthur a coronation tribute of "a few dirty leaves with fleas on them." Shakespeare used the squeal of a "hedge-pig" to quite different effect in MacBeth, helping to build the sinister atmosphere of the countryside around the three witches.
Hedgehogs have continued to make popular subjects for the imagination, from the whimsical Hedgehog in the Fog by the Russian animator Yuri Norstein, to The Hodgeheg, by Dick King-Smith - author of Babe - the story of a young hedgehog who solves the problem of a busy road, and its sequel, King Max the Last.
Even Sega found it had created one of its most successful characters in Sonic the Hedgehog, a fearless blue creature in red trainers ready to take on all comers and now reaching his tenth anniversary.
A variety of writers, from the 15 th century onwards, have made use of a certain quality of "hedghogness" to create vivid descriptions. In 1828, Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his first novel, Fanshawe, described a character as having "firmness, decision and confident sagacity, which made her a sort of domestic hedge-hog". In 1876, Elizabeth Wetherell, in Daisy in Field, wrote: "That hedgehog of thoughts began to stir and unfold and come to life". And in 1883, in a fascinatingly vivid piece of invictive, John Rushkin decried an opponent as follows: "So your hedgehoggy readers roll themselves over and over their Bibles and declare that whatever sticks to their spines is Scripture!".
Scottish Natural Heritage says that its problem is that of the hedgehog's image. No-one is prepared to accept they might be flea-ridden vermin that are endangering rare wildlife. Too many of us were raised on the image of the impeccable little washer-woman in the pinny, Beatrix Potters "dear person".
However, there is much about hedgehogs which deserves sympathy. They are a throwback to a more peaceful age and the modern world is a hazardous place for them. Their biggest predator is the car: a hedgehog's nightly ramblings in search for food might take him across 20 roads. In response to this, tunnels and bridges have been constructed to try to minimise casualties, but the hedgehog is still among the country's most common roadkill.
Cattle grids are a potential trap, as are garden ponds - although hedgehogs can swim well, they cannot climb up the slippery plastic sides. Annual warnings are given by the British Hedgehog Preservation Society on Guy Fawkes Night, advising the public to check their piles of wood and leaves before they strike a match, to save the lives of any hibernating hedgehogs who have taken refuge in the pile.
A more bizarre danger presented itself this year, causing a flurry of complaints to the BHPS. A significant number of hedgehogs were found to have starved to death after getting their heads stuck in McDonald's McFlurry cartons. The fast food chain is piloting a design for a hedgehog-friendly carton for the UK.
However, it seems that the dangers facing the hedgehog are more significant still. The BHPS says numbers are in serious decline; although no full census has been carried out, the population could have dropped by up to half. Hedgehogs could be extinct within a decade. The chief culprit is the changing nature of the countryside: intensified farming methods, vanishing hedgerows, fertilisers and insecticides damaging the hedgehog food supply. Some have fled the country for a life in urban gardens, but this is only a partial solution. Like songbirds, hedgehogs are an indicator for the state of the environment, an indicator of a much more serious problem which could affect us all.
So it is hard to break our sense of sympathy for them. Perhaps there is a bit of the hedgehog in all of us. We share their mix of self-preservation and vulnerability. Confronted with the problems of the world bearing down on them like a ten-tonne truck, the instinctive hedgehog response is to curl into a spikey ball and wait for the crisis to go away. And who would blame them? It would take a lot to break our love affair with the hedgehog. They are too much like us.
© Herald, 21 st December 2002
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