The Hedgehog's Dilemma

by Hugh Warwick

  The Uists

  ‘Who let the hogs out?’ – Sun

  At around the same time John Tulloch had been delivering hedgehogs to North Ronaldsay, someone, and as the story unfolds their desire for anonymity will become understandable, repeated the experiment on South Uist in the Outer Hebrides. This delivery had far more dramatic consequences; it gave headline writers a chance to exercise their wit and it also persuaded me to dust off my head torch, get out my thermal underwear and re-enter the hedgehog fray two decades later.

  Ornithologist Digger Jackson had been busy counting birds out on the Uists. His work on these three islands began in the 1980s but did not really have an impact until he published a scientific paper in 2000, ‘The Importance of the Introduced Hedgehog as a Predator of the Eggs of Waders on Machair in South Uist, Scotland’.

  The machair, a rare, sandy habitat, is protected under European law, and the protection extends to the internationally important populations of dunlins and ringed plovers that breed there each spring – around the same time some 7,000 hedgehogs emerge, hungry, from hibernation.

  The legislation required that the relevant authority, Scottish Natural Heritage, take action to protect the eggs of the birds and in 2001 they commissioned a report from hedgehog expert Nigel Reeve.

  There were three options once you accepted that the status quo was untenable: remove the hedgehogs, fence the nesting birds, or a combination of the two. The real question became that of how to remove the hedgehogs? Dead or alive?

  ‘Slaughter of the innocents is a prickly subject’

  – Press and Journal, Scottish newspaper

  In 2003, hedgehogs hit the headlines: Scottish Natural Heritage had decided that hedgehogs must be killed. As the newspapers filled with the story of the forthcoming cull, I assumed that Nigel Reeve must have uncovered something new in his research. The reasons given by SNH for the decision to kill hedgehogs was that moving them would be cruel, that the translocated hedgehogs would suffer a ‘slow and lingering death’, that they would succumb to unnamed diseases or oust resident hedgehogs. Which was all news to me: my experience with hedgehogs in Devon certainly suggested that far less well-equipped hedgehogs fare well on release into a new environment.

  I decided I wanted to see the situation on the Uists for myself and managed to persuade the BBC’s Natural History Unit to lend me the kit to record a piece about the cull for radio. I went, perhaps surprisingly for someone with such a professed love of hedgehogs, with a rather ambivalent attitude to their fate – I really respect Nigel Reeve and if he had said they must die, then, sadly, I would agree.

  The public face of the cull was SNH’s George Anderson. He was adamant. Killing hedgehogs was the only way – and he even made a counterintuitive case on the grounds of hedgehog welfare. Killing them was less stressful than keeping them caged for a week on the island, surrounded by other hedgehogs – these are solitary animals. And then there is the transporting to the mainland (do hedgehogs get seasick?), being housed in a new rescue centre before being released into an unfamiliar garden. He could be right, I suppose; perhaps a quick death was better. But something felt wrong with the argument.

  The RSPCA, their Scottish counterparts the SSPCA, and hundreds of other carers rescue, look after and release thousands of hedgehogs into unfamiliar places each year. Is all this work for naught?

  ‘Mrs Tiggywinkle brigade can’t halt a prickly pogrom’ – Daily Mail

  I finished my interview with George Anderson still feeling something was not right and went off in search of the other side of the debate. Because this is what made the story all the more fascinating: not only was there a cull of hedgehogs, but there was also a team of people on the islands doing their darnedest to save as many hedgehogs as possible from lethal injection.

  Uist Hedgehog Rescue was a coalition of Advocates for Animals, the British Hedgehog Preservation Society (BHPS), International Animal Rescue and the Hessilhead Wildlife Rescue Trust, for the first year also joined by the Wildlife Hospital Trust from St Tiggywinkles. They had set up a rescue centre on Benbecula, lying in between North and South Uist; causeways connect them.

  UHR spokesperson Ross Minett added a well-needed touch of glamour to the proceedings (he was recently voted Europe’s sexiest vegetarian). He explained how the conflict started. I was shocked to find that Nigel’s original study, which had actually looked at the feasibility of translocating hedgehogs alive, had been dismissed, with SNH contracting John Kirkwood, director of the Humane Slaughter Association, to produce a further report. Do you think he might be coming to the table with a little bit of baggage? What did he decide was the most humane solution? Slaughter, obviously.

  He concluded that the welfare implications of translocating hedgehogs were just too great. He dismissed contraception, as the technology has yet to be developed. Rather bizarrely, he investigated the idea of a hedgehog zoo to house them, a sort of Guantanamo Bay, illegal combatants from the war on egg-eaters. In the end he went with what he knew best.

  And then came the personal shock: evidence that Kirkwood used to justify his position was from some of my own work – a rather inappropriate extrapolation I believe, as the situations were far removed. My work had been looking at the survival of overwintered juveniles being released after six months of captivity, not healthy adults being held for a week or so.

  To try to prevent the cull, UHR and the Mammals Trust (UK) tried to develop a study that would satisfy SNH’s concerns about hedgehog welfare. Pat Morris was heavily involved and when I asked him about it he became uncharacteristically explicit. ‘SNH has been obdurate in its communications with the people who know about hedgehog ecology and hedgehog welfare,’ he said. ‘At short notice, SNH requested a scientific study to prove that no significant damage was done to trans-located Uist animals or the recipient population. The latter is impossible to prove. Our workable proposal for a study was then rejected by SNH leaving too little time to set up a study for this season. SNH knew that at the time. Their objections to the proposal were unrealistic.’

  Pat also explained that some of the science SNH was quoting was wrong. The claim was made that if hedgehogs were moved from the Uists to the mainland, the mainland population would suffer because of additional competition for resources. Sort of a ‘one in, one out’ policy – you add a hedgehog to the population near Glasgow and another one falls off Beachy Head. This is known as ‘density dependent’ population regulation.

  But that is not how it works with hedgehogs. The controlling factor of hedgehog population size is not density. Overwinter survival is probably a more important mechanism. And it is also worth considering that whatever natural mechanism has evolved over the last 20 million years to govern hedgehog numbers, there is the very new ‘predation’ from cars to consider. A few more from the Western Isles are really not going to tip the balance.

  It also became clear, from talking to hedgehog carers, that there were no diseases that the hedgehogs were likely to catch which they couldn’t already find in the Outer Hebrides. It is not as if this was a population long isolated and in the process of forming a new species. And as for the fleas, again there was no evidence that a Uist hedgehog was going to suffer anything other than the odd itch should fleas take advantage of the new blood.

  It felt as if SNH had decided that culling was the only option and did not want to give any ground, even in the face of very persuasive arguments from some of the most experienced hedgehog experts.

  ‘Uist goes to war over hedgehogs galore’ – Sunday Times

  I was not the only reporter on the islands for the cull; the story had made such an impact that there was a rather impressive turn-out from the national media. Did the cull really begin on 1 April? We had been directed to assemble near a hotel before heading out into the dark to meet the team of cullers; or rather, to not meet them, but to see their silhouettes. There was a ripple of shock when SNH’s spin doctor told us that we would not be able to see the faces of the people doing th
e cull, or learn their names, because they were in fear of the animal rights extremists who had come over to the island. Most of the journalists scribbled notes, the photographers muttered rudely under their breath about the limitations they were being confronted with, and we tried to scrabble some sort of image out of torchlight and shadowy hedgehog hunters. The media had all left the island the following morning, without the opportunity to check with the hedgehog rescuers to see if they really were animal rights extremists.

  Now, I have met dangerous animal rights extremists. I was caught up in a ferocious battle at Hillgrove cat farm in Oxfordshire. As I tried to record some material about the campaign to close this breeding centre that supplied animal-testing laboratories, the mob bombarded police and the farm with a rain of stones. It was scary, though on that day the police were marginally scarier.

  The folk of UHR were not like this. The most extreme thing they did was mount the first ever demonstration of its kind on the islands, standing before the shed where the killing was to take place with a banner reading ‘Fly home the hedgehogs, save the waders’.

  A few years later I met an animal rights activist who had gone up to the Uists the following year. A small crowd had been attracted by the publicity generated during the first year’s conflict and headed up in a minibus to join all the others, who were not there, as they had never existed. The group was also rather disappointed by the lack of hedgehogs.

  He explained that rather than be on the islands for a fight, they were there to save hedgehogs, so there was a mutually agreed policy that the rescuers and cullers would operate in different areas, avoiding conflict. Hedgehogs avoid conflict with mutual avoidance too.

  But the animal rights lot got bored. They were finding so few hedgehogs that it was hardly worth their while staying, so they turned their attention to the sheep – another imported animal that was in need of rescuing, so they argued. They set about trying to ship a few back to the mainland and free them from a fate of cutlets and chops. I got the impression that the authorities were not too happy about the emergence of ethical sheep rustling.

  SNH shot themselves in the foot a bit with this. Not only did the painting of gentle hedgehog rescuers with a militant tag attract what they most feared, but it also meant that they were unable to change their mind. SNH could not be seen to be forced into a change of policy by the actions of a group of animal rights activists.

  Bringing animal rights into the question got me thinking. It felt as if this debate had caused a shift in conventional positions. SNH had taken on the mantle of the arbiter of animal welfare, certainly not their normal job. But then serious zoologists had taken a stance based on animal rights. There was no doubting that the hedgehogs’ welfare would be least affected by a swift death. But what about their right to life? Unusual to think of respectable academics donning balaclavas, but then again, perhaps we jump too quickly to conclusions when animal rights are mentioned.

  ‘Right, lads, that’s one down, just 4,999 to go’ – Daily Mail

  How do you go about rescuing hedgehogs? How could a rag-tag bunch of volunteers compete with the well-funded operation of SNH?

  The carefully choreographed dance, avoiding conflict, rather put paid to the image of a scrum of people diving for hedgehogs; whoever got it determined its fate.

  That said, to begin with it was hardly a level playing field. While the cullers were out at night with torches that burned the back of your eyes and left the air sizzling, the rescuers had come across a problem.

  There is a practice known as ‘lamping’ where people go out at night, dazzle wildlife with a strong torch and, while the deer, rabbit or fox is trying to work out what the hell is going on, they get blasted with a gun. In the Wildlife and Countryside Act (1981), section 11.2.c, there are controls that require people out at night using a torch to find mammals to have a licence. So hedgehog rescuers had to have a licence. But who held the right to grant the licence? That’s right, SNH. And they wouldn’t.

  Fortunately, there was a way around this. It was perfectly reasonable for someone to use a torch to light their path if they were out at night. After all, with those rabbit holes the machair is a potential death trap. And if, as they walk, their companion spies a hedgehog in the light of the torch, they are allowed to pick it up without a licence.

  However, it quickly became apparent that wandering around at night hoping to find hedgehogs is a pretty inefficient way of going about hedgehog rescuing. So the rescuers started a bounty scheme that helped foster their place in the community. In the first year it was £5 per happy hedgehog, but this was raised to £20 the following year. The scheme was only open to islanders who had undertaken training in how to look after hogs and minimize any distress. The press, obviously, loved this idea. And some islanders made a pretty packet during the hedgehog season, which ended early enough in the year so as not to risk picking up nursing mothers and potentially starve their young. A gamekeeper from North Uist rescued over fifty hedgehogs and another islander netted around thirty. In total nearly £5,000 was paid in bounties to islanders – equivalent to the cost to the taxpayer of SNH killing nearly five hedgehogs.

  ‘Duchess offers to save hedgehogs’ – The Times

  The mutual avoidance on the ground was not so evident back on the mainland and quite a war was waged through the pages of the press.

  SNH spread a story that islanders were going to be the focus of attention of the tax office for not declaring the gifts they were receiving for rescuing hedgehogs (this turned out not to be the case) and the rescuers began to recruit an array of celebrities to help the cause. And what a mixed bunch. Support came in from Paul McCartney, Sting, Joanna Lumley, Richard Adams, Carla Lane, Martin Shaw and Twiggy. The Duchess of Hamilton and Tim Rice both offered their land as release sites.

  A raffle to help raise funds included gifts of signed books from Ann Widdecombe and a boxload of goodies from Brian May. This was my first brush with Ann Widdecombe, MP for Maidstone and the Weald, since she had involuntarily helped me earn much needed money by being custard-pied in front of my camera. A few years later, on her sixtieth birthday, she asked her friends to make donations to the British Hedgehog Preservation Society in lieu of presents. When I met her some time later at her Whitehall office she was amazingly charming and full of love for our mutual friend.

  Her love for hedgehogs came from her father and she would enjoy watching them visit their garden when she was a child. When he died, she arranged for the collection at his memorial to be for hedgehogs, and the same with her mother. So when it came to Ann’s birthday there was a logical solution to a major problem. ‘What I absolutely dreaded, having been through this for my fiftieth,’ she explained, ‘was a house full of presents for which I simply did not have room.’

  I asked why she had become involved with the Uist story and she was unsurprisingly forthright. ‘I saw no reason to carry out mass murder of a perfectly ordinary and inoffensive colony of hedgehogs.’

  I was more surprised by the support of Brian May. My schooldays had been spent dreaming of being able to play the guitar like him. I could rhapsodize about his skill; in fact, we spent an age trying to come up with suitable puns for a press release to announce his support – ‘Another one spikes the dust’, ‘Crazy prickle thing called love’, ‘Culler Queen’ – and got nowhere close to anything that was not awful. And however much I tried to coerce Fay at the BHPS into fixing the raffle draw, she would not let me win his contribution of musical paraphernalia. Most unfair.

  I really wanted to know why he was involved, though. It seemed such an unlikely cause to champion. It is not as if he is without extracurricular activities: he has just completed his PhD in astrophysics (put on hold in 1970, when Queen took over his life) and written a modest little book about the origins of everything called Bang: The Complete History of the Universe and played ‘God Save the Queen’ on his guitar atop Buckingham Palace to celebrate the golden jubilee.

  So I wrote to him, totally expecting
to be fobbed off by a multi-layered bureaucracy of minders, and was delighted to get an immediate response, full of outrage. ‘I was outraged when I heard of the senseless killing of healthy, native creatures . . . already captive and perfectly able to be relocated,’ he wrote. ‘I was also outraged at the logical absurdity of a bunch of birds of very small brains being put above these delightful and intelligent mammals.’

  How my heart soared when I read that – he was the first person I have come across to articulate this bird/mammal debate so simply. And to ask a very pertinent question: why do we favour some species over others? Has conservation descended to a popularity contest?

  And then he raised a very interesting point. ‘Most of all,’ he continued, ‘I was outraged that this cruelty was being defended by . . . people supposedly engaged in the prevention of cruelty to animals.’

  Where was the SSPCA in all of this? The Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was being remarkably quiet. The RSPCA had already said that it was ‘disappointed by the decision taken by Scottish Natural Heritage to proceed with a cull of hedgehogs . . .’

  Strangely, the SSPCA had based their tacit support for the cull on the information supplied to them by SNH – that a translocation would lead to significant mortality. But the translocation would be doing nothing more complicated than what the SSPCA already do for hundreds of hedgehogs each year from their own Middlebank Wildlife Centre. This meant that either the SSPCA believed they themselves were releasing hedgehogs that were going to suffer a significant mortality, or they did not really believe what SNH were saying. Neither way looked good.