Prickly friends

Now that I've given up mowing for the winter, the tunnels through the grass in various corners of the acre have become a lot more evident, and an occasional shiny black dropping confirms that our hedgehogs are still happily on the move, munching away at beetles and slugs and putting on fat for an eventual hibernation, as and when that seems a good idea.

A circular from the British Hedgehog Preservation Society (in a climate where the "tiggy-winkles" hibernate more reliably) reminds gardeners that piles of leaves and other garden rubbish are often where hedgehogs build their winter nests. Making bonfires can wreck their endeavours, if not actually roast the poor animals. And it suggests putting out a dish of pet food (and one of water) - well, no harm in that.

Then it goes on: "Hedgehogs weighing under 500 gms will certainly not survive hibernation, so any small ones seen out and about, particularly during the day, from October onwards, should be weighed." The BHPS offers advice on over-wintering underweight hedgehogs*, in just the same spirit as it raised funds to pay for ramps to help hedgehogs escape from cattle grids.

Rounding up underweight hedgehogs and fattening them up does seem to steer close to interfering with genetic fitness and disrupting hedgehog population dynamics. But so little is left of the truly natural in the outer suburbs of English hedgehog-fanciers that one more twist in the ecosystem is probably neither here nor there: if you are a preserver of tiggy-winkles, preserving them is what you do.

Even in our own unkempt acre, full of the brambled corners and tangled hedge-bottoms that are a hedgehog's delight, there is the feeling of amiable association between these tough little animals and ourselves. They eat a lot of our garden slugs and we give them somewhere safe to live. If we ever get around to replacing the gate with a cattle-grid, it will certainly have a ramp in one corner and even a luminous arrow to point the way.

The simple satisfaction of knowing the hedgehogs are there seems to make up for bumping into them so rarely: they're up and down the paths when we're asleep. Our rural world is obviously at a far remove from that of the night-owl city people who now have hedgehogs as indoor pets, and whose preoccupations may be sampled by offering "hedgehog" to Yahoo on the Internet.

Since Time magazine declared hedgehogs "pet of the year" for 1995 they have, it seems, been sweeping North America as a new "yuppy puppy" that doesn't need taking for walks. The New World has no hedgehogs of its own: porcupines, yes, which are vegetarian rodents, but none of the Old World's 14 species of Erinaceidae, the hedgehogs and moon rats, all spiny or long-haired eaters of insects and other invertebrates.

Thus, the Fairview Hedgehog Farm in St George, Ontario, Canada (http://www.advantage. ca/mainse), which offers to airfreight its pets anywhere in the world, is unlikely to be breeding our own beloved Erinaceus europaeus. My hopes of discovering the actual species were twice frustrated by the screen freezing up in mid-jingle, but not before I had noted some of the hedgehog's special selling-points: "unique, cute and fun to hold; non-allergenic; quiet; no offensive odour; can use cat litter", and so on.

One species, however, dominates the hedgehog cages of North America's over-heated apartments. This is the four-toed, white-bellied hedgehog, Erinaceus albiventris, more at home in the wild among the termite hills of central Africa (or even high up on Mount Kilimanjaro). It has been bred for the pet trade since the 1980s, and at six to eight inches long is more widely known as the African pygmy hedgehog.

In the European pet trade, the hedgehog on offer is likely to be the long-eared, equally diminutive, so-called Egyptian species, Hemiechinus auritus, which, while "extremely cute", is more likely to bite when handled than to lay back its spines in trust and affection. Hedgehogs in general are "not cuddly lap-fungus type pets".

For these observations I am indebted to the Usenet FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) document on hedgehogs, maintained and up-dated by Brian MacNamara (http://www.pci.on.ca/macnamar/ hedgehogs/faq) somewhere in Canada. FAQs are assembled through the newsgroups which populate the Web with such disparate and fascinating fellowships, and are one of the glories of Internet culture.

This is where you may learn, for example, how to construct an exercise-wheel for your hedgehog, adapting perhaps, a 10-inch ferret wheel, or using ice-lolly sticks and lining the treads with sandpaper, but not of so coarse a grade as to make the animal's feet sore. The poor creature may run five miles in a night, at 12 m.p.h., crapping periodically, which creates its own problems of maintenance. But without such exercise, it may suffer a fatty liver, or worse.

African pigmy hedgehogs are not, of course, used to hibernating (though they may aestivate, an analogous sort of sleep, if things get too dry and hot). They are, however, strictly nocturnal, whirring away in the corner through the dark hours. This makes them the ideal pet, of course, as company for people who like to sit at their computers all night, searching out the strange things that go on in the world.

The hedgehog FAQ faces up to one obvious contingency: releasing pet hedgehogs into the wild is "cruel and dangerous - don't do it". And there's a very sensible section on the welfare of the wild European hedgehog, including leaving a thick rope dangling into your garden pond (or, I suppose, your cattle grid) as a help to scrambling out from some absentminded plunge.

*The British Hedgehog Protection Society keeps a home-page at http://rs306.ccs.bbk.ac.uk/flora/ hedgeh.htm and lives otherwise at Knowbury House, Ludlow, Shropshire, SY8 3LQ.