by Hugh Warwick
That would be a disaster. Elaine is better placed than most to see the impact on people of meeting a hedgehog face to face. ‘Children who have held one, that will stay with them for the rest of their lives. I hope that they leave here with a feeling of responsibility for hedgehogs and all wildlife.’
And the reason why they are so good at making this impact goes beyond aesthetics. Yes, Elaine waxes lyrical about their amazing fluffy tummies and cute faces, but she believes there is more. ‘You’ve only got to meet one,’ she says. ‘Anyone who runs one over and thinks that it is just a hedgehog, they should be made to hold one and look at it nose to nose and realize what they are capable of, how hardy and courageous they are. These are miracle animals.’
So how has this happened? How have hedgehogs gone from creatures of portent to this most loved of animals?
One measure of our attitudes to a species can be seen in literature. And this is where 1905 becomes so significant. Before 1905, hedgehogs appeared – how could they not – in stories aimed at children. Fairy tales cast the hedgehog in a mysterious or mischievous light – the Brothers Grimm used them well, though with some rather adult overtones, Kipling inaccurately imported them to South America for a Just So story, but that was all before 1905 and the publication of perhaps the most important book any species has ever starred in, The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle. We are talking year zero spanning two eras – BBP and ABP: Before Beatrix Potter and After Beatrix Potter. Rarely do I meet someone who does not refer to Mrs Tiggy-Winkle at some point in a discussion about the attraction of hedgehogs.
In fact Ms Potter was even more remarkable than most people realize. Changing our perceptions of wildlife and seriously upping the ante on anthropomorphism were a sideshow for her true, and largely unrequited, love. Beatrix Potter was a scientist, a gifted and intuitive scientist who, if she had been born in less discriminatory times, might have achieved things greater than Mrs Tiggy-Winkle. Tom Wakeford, author of the wonderful book Liaisons of Life, describes her story as ‘a legend of youthful scientific inquiry stifled by pomposity and prejudice, and of a heresy that was later vindicated’.
She was an early advocate of symbiosis and the case that drew her in was that of lichen. In the late nineteenth century the idea that a plant could be made up of a mutually beneficial union of fungi and algae was the heresy Wakeford refers to, but by the time the idea had been accepted, Beatrix Potter had turned her back on the chauvinistic scientific establishment.
Not content with being a writer and a scientist, she was also a highly regarded painter. Have a look at some of the illustrations in her books. For a start, see Lucie as she climbs over the stile before walking up the hill. Meticulous foxgloves to her left and, to her right, lichens on the drystone wall.
The Tiggy-Winkle fascination extends across the arts. I was interviewed recently for the magazine of the Royal Academy of Dance by someone who wanted to know how similar the character of Mrs T, springing across the stage in the ballet The Tales of Beatrix Potter, was to the real beast. It made me think a little more about the problems a hedgehog would face as washerwoman. Apart from the damage caused to the garments from her spines, there is the general aroma of hedgehog that would infuse everything. But still, Potter captured an essential truth about the hedgehog, despite it being utterly preposterous.
Post-Tiggy, the world of children’s literature was never the same again. Not just in the volume of anthropomorphic stories, and more specifically hedgehog-related stories, but also in the character given to hedgehogs. Beatrix Potter saw in the hedgehog the epitome of benign. An animal that would not and could not cause harm, but whose quiet industriousness was a quality that should, in fact, be admired. I would be hard pressed to find an ABP hedgehog story that was not kind to the animal.
And there have been so many. The pile I have beside my desk is already considerable. This far from comprehensive gathering contains nineteen picture books, fifteen story books and two wildlife guides.
* * *
One day someone might write a book about the most northerly wildlife hospital I visited. It would feature hedgehogs. A lot. While Andy and Gay Christie, who run Hessilhead, look after far more than our spiky friends, they have been at the centre of efforts to get the cull stopped on the Uists and have hundreds of rescued animals passing through their hands each year.
Beyond Glasgow, near the village of Gateside, there is a rough track off the narrow road. If you did not know, you would not give it a second glance, but at the end of this track there is something miraculous. It is as if Heath Robinson had retired to North Ayrshire and dedicated his remaining days to constructing elaborate techniques of wildlife care out of the most basic ingredients. This is very unlike the modern hospitals of St Tigs and Vale, but it bustles with a healthy energy.
As I arrived the day shift was ending and a steady stream of people were heading for the chalets that are their accommodation. There are qualified vets from Italy and trainees from Spain, England and Scotland. There was a quality in their smiles and chatter that tells a story of hard work done willingly. Gay and Andy were just finishing a round of feeding the young birds and hedgehogs. Some of these animals need to be fed half-hourly during the day; others need to be fed every two hours, all day long. It is obviously very demanding, especially when there is a surge of youngsters in spring.
After a coffee I got a chance to look around the hospital and the convalescence cages. I was keen to meet a famous non-hedgehog guest, simply because it is not every day one gets to play with a fox. Fergus was a delight.
‘He is a complete failure,’ Gay declared as he wound himself around my legs. ‘He came to us from a barbecue. Someone had rescued him when he was young and then released him when he looked big enough. The problem was that he was just too friendly and we were called as he had ended up jumping on to the cook’s shoulders.’
Fergus has his uses: he may be a failure as he cannot be released into the wild, but he makes a wonderful advocate for the oft-maligned reynardine. How seductive a tame wild animal can be; despite being an adult, he behaved like a juvenile, submissive and playful.
It all started with a swan. Andy was working as a countryside ranger and would often get handed the odd waif and stray to patch up, but then came a swan. It had swallowed a fishing hook and the vet they took it to said there was nothing to be done without an operation. As Gay and Andy had no money, it was euthanized.
And that changed their lives. In 1970 they reared their first fox cubs and have hardly drawn breath since then. Andy took early retirement in the mid-1990s and Hessilhead has flourished. Now they receive around 3,500 animals a year. And the most popular mammal? No prizes for guessing that it is the hedgehog.
‘It was non-stop this spring,’ Gay recalled. ‘Luckily the hedgehog peak arrived before we started to get really busy with fledglings, but even so we had 100 hedgehogs arrive in just five days, 241 in total.’
That seems like a lot of hedgehogs, but to get an idea of what it means to an already stretched team of staff and volunteers you just need to do a brief calculation. First thing in the morning the hogs are cleaned out and given fresh bedding, food and water. They are also weighed, so that tabs can be kept on their progress. That all takes an experienced carer about ten minutes per animal, which works out at an extra sixteen hours of work per day arriving in just one week.
As soon as they can get them back out into the wild, they do. But not knowing what happens to them always preys on their minds. ‘We cannot afford to radio-track them,’ Andy said. ‘So it was great to get a call the other day from someone who just said, “I got your number from a hedgehog.” And he had seen this hedgehog toddling across his garden accompanied by four babies. What a result.’
This filled my mind with wonderful images of talkative hedgehogs, until Andy burst the fantastical bubble with the explanation: ‘This year we tagged each hedgehog with a little plastic marker glued on to the spines. It had a unique number for the hog, so we could track it back to
our records, along with our phone number.’
It is this simple pragmatism that makes Gay and Andy so attractive. They are just trying their hardest to do the best for animals that are going to show scant regard for the care they receive. And in some cases, fight quite hard against the care. So why? Why are people willing to invest so much time and energy in such an unreciprocated relationship?
Initially Gay sounded rather soft: ‘Well, it’s how they look, their twitchy nose and the way they look up at you. It is very appealing.’ But she soon brought this down to earth: ‘Though they are smelly, they show no affection, no gratitude. And that is part of the reason why they are such good animals to work with for rehabilitation. They don’t get tame; they retain their wildness.’
And this is something I can really relate to. Hedgehogs can have a lot done to them, but they remain robustly immune to human interference. There are many people who tell me about their hedgehog, who comes to their garden every night. They even get worried when they go on holiday. Who will feed their hedgehog? Well, hedgehogs are quite adept at fending for themselves and Pat Morris tackled this rather proprietorial notion with a delightfully simple experiment. He got people to put a spot of paint or nail varnish on the spines of their hedgehog and of any other hog that might turn up. Most people found that their hedgehog was in fact many hedgehogs.
However many ‘owners’ suburban hedgehogs may have, they are still beset by numerous challenges. Gay and Andy have had them come in with all conceivable – and some inconceivable – traumas. Stuck down drains or in septic tanks, or, depressingly, deliberately beaten, kicked or burned. Sometimes it is the simple acts of human carelessness that create the most distressing cases. ‘The rubber bands dropped by the postman can be disastrous,’ explained Andy. ‘We have had hedgehogs that have the bands stuck around their bodies or legs. The bands have been pushed into their flesh, flies have laid eggs and maggots are eating the hedgehogs alive. They are tough, those hedgehogs, and can make a full recovery if we get to them in time.’
Andy is not immune to the charm of the hedgehogs either: ‘They are such confident wee animals. Everybody sees them, they don’t run away, you can pick them up and get a good look at them. But perhaps the most important thing is that they don’t make violent movements. Even a mouse makes sudden darting movements that can scare people, but no one could feel threatened by a hedgehog.’
Andy and Gay had to get back to the hospital for another round of feeding the wee beasties before I joined them for food and some fine whisky. On the way up past the cage of crows, all looking excitedly towards the outside world, seeming to know that their release was imminent, Gay points to the trees that surround this field of sheds and aviaries. ‘We rescued them as well,’ she exclaims. ‘They were along a disused railway line that was about to be converted into a cycle path and would have just been destroyed, so we have rescued them, rehabilitated them and released them into the wild.’ She smiles with innocent self-satisfaction.
I really hope that they can one day stand back and look with pride as Hessilhead takes flight, or snuffles off into the undergrowth. Like the animals they care for, the centre has to learn to cope in the wild on its own.
That snuffling – hard to describe, but when you have heard it, it is so distinctive, and by far the easiest way of finding hedgehogs.
When Ted Hughes heard it he was so moved that he wrote not a poem, but a letter to a friend in which he described meeting a hedgehog and deciding to take it home. The great poet realised his companion was suffering in confinement and was moved to kiss away its tears.
On the other side from Ted Hughes is Pam Ayres, who has written a manifesto for hedgehog conservation, one that I think we should take up as an anthem for the BHPS.
In Defence of Hedgehogs
I am very fond of hedgehogs
Which makes me want to say,
That I am struck with wonder,
How there’s any left today,
For each morning as I travel
And no short distance that,
All I see are hedgehogs,
Squashed. And dead. And flat.
And on it goes for many more verses. Surpassed in length, though, by the imagination of the prolifically inventive Terry Pratchett – ‘The Hedgehog Can Never Be Buggered At All’. This song has taken on a life of its own, Pratchett’s original was just an idea of what unspeakably rude outpourings may emerge from a drunken witch called Nanny Ogg in the Wyrd Sisters; but readers were not content and have created a many-versed investigation into the possibilities of bestiality, returning to the truism about the hedgehogs’ impregnable backside.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, chose a rather more sedate ditty for one of his Desert Island Discs, ‘The Hedgehog’s Song’ from the Incredible String Band.
I was lucky enough to have a chat with the song’s composer, Mike Heron. Why did he gift a hedgehog with such wisdom? ‘I needed to find an animal that would chide me for my lack of commitment in the song and real life as the song is about my relationship with a beautiful French girl.’ He then surprised me by revealing that the choice of a hedgehog was arbitrary, especially as it feels so right. ‘Well, after I’d written the song, I got to meet many more hedgehogs, and yes, there is something special. There is something about the hedgehog that punches well above its weight.’
Hedgehogs can be woven into many philosophies and my favourite came out of the blue at a party. I met someone who had studied a lot of Buddhism, so much so that she had renamed herself Maitrisara. We exchanged pleasantries and when I said what I was up to I mentioned that people invariably have a hedgehog story to share. She looked a little bewildered, seemingly disproving my point. But a short while later there was a look of complete satisfaction as she said, ‘Ah, I had forgotten about the transcendental hedgehog.’ Now, that is too good an opener not to get me hooked. ‘I had this Buddhist teacher who was trying to explain to us the point of meditation and Buddhist practice. And he hit upon a story to help make it clearer. He pointed to the garden. “Every evening I put out food for the hedgehog,” he explained. “Now, putting out food does not mean that I will see a hedgehog and, in the same way, meditating does not mean you will achieve enlightenment. But both will make success more likely.” And that was my introduction to the transcendental hedgehog.’ And mine as well.
All around the world references to hedgehogs have snuffled into the vernacular. They have been appropriated by every art and craft; used as metaphors in philosophy; they sell us shoes, banking and expensive bondage equipment. But, in this post-Potter world, there is a common theme of gentle compassion.
The hedgehog works because we are drawn to the very idea of what it is to be a hedgehog. Perhaps it is because the hedgehog seems so at home in its skin. Hedgehogs are very happy being hedgehogs. And you can’t say that for all animals – when the blackbird flusters away in shock, again, at the sight of her umpteenth unthreatening human, you do begin to wonder how happy she is.
But that does not explain why people so readily dedicate their lives to caring for the little animals.
There are plenty of quite superficial reasons – most focusing on the need to redress the damage done by humanity. We are interfering with nature every time we get into a car. Not just by injuring and killing wildlife on the roads, but by changing the climate with our exhausts. Every time we take a bite of food from the industrial agriculture factory that was once the countryside, we are interfering with the natural world. And every time we take a strimmer thoughtlessly to the undergrowth, or light a bonfire without first checking if it is anybody’s home, we are interfering.
But I believe there is a deeper reason. Partly it is ‘biophilia’, an idea developed by Edward O. Wilson, an astoundingly inventive, clever and knowledgeable Harvard biologist. He asserts that there is an innate need for humanity to have contact with the natural world. But partly I think it is because positive selection for nurturing behaviour among humans is strong. The long-running
evolutionary struggle between the need for lengthy gestation to allow all of our amazing faculties to develop and the need for women to be able to walk on two legs (if our heads were any bigger at birth, the female pelvis would have to be redesigned in such a way as to prevent bipedal locomotion) has led to the compromise of a helpless infant that requires prolonged care. Parents who have the skills to successfully care for their infants are more likely to have their genes passed on to the next generation.
Hence the positive selection of nurturing behaviour. There is evidence that early, pre-agricultural humans had pets. These animals, while having some utility, were treated differently to proto-livestock and were obviously valued more highly than other species. It could be argued that they were reducing the sense of isolation that adult humans felt when they no longer had infants to care for. That is, the strength of the innate desire to nurture still needed to be met.
If you compare pet animals to their wild counterparts you will notice that the sacrifice an animal makes in becoming a pet is to be infantilized. Not only does this make a pet more pleasant company, but it also ensures nurturing is required for life.
So, we have a genetic predisposition to nurture. We have an evolutionary history that suggests a tendency to nurture wild animals and tame them into a state of permanent dependency.
Throw into the mix an animal that, in many ways, acts as if it were tame. Hedgehogs do not behave like a wild animal. They do not run away. They do not attack. If they do not roll up instantly, they tend to look up at an approaching human in a vulnerable, throat-exposing way that suggests submission. They allow themselves to be looked after, partly because they do not have the capacity to escape, but also in part because they let it happen.