The Hedgehog's Dilemma

by Hugh Warwick

  So it didn’t have to be me being soft – it was all her fault. She asked how much. Liu Daming replied 100 yuan (about £7), though I am fairly sure he had mentioned something about twenty yuan when asked earlier. I pulled the note out of my pocket and he went to get Dora. He came back with a large polystyrene box, all bound up with twine.

  We started to say goodbye, when it became clear that he was getting into the taxi with us for a lift back to the village where we met him. So we were not going to be releasing Dora quite yet, then. I wonder what he thought we were going to do with the hedgehog. Take it back to the UK? Barbecue it in our hotel room? I never did find out.

  We let him out and said our farewells. Any time we were back this way we should drop by and say hi, he said. Then off he went to his meat-roasting business.

  And what was the taxi driver thinking? A couple of kilometres out of the village we asked her to stop and I jumped out with the box, cut the twine and walked 100 metres or so away from the road. The area seemed uncultivated, there were no dwellings in sight and there was plenty of leaf litter, suggesting that there would be shelter and food to hand. I picked her up and placed her gently on the ground. That was the first time I had ever ‘owned’ a wild animal and it was very brief. Just fifteen minutes. But it was great to see her relax, stick out her snout and begin to move. I left her to her new life. Maybe she would be picked up again tonight and end up in Liu Daming’s dark room of beasts. Maybe she would be OK. Who knows? All I did was all I could do.

  I suddenly felt very tired as I walked back to the taxi. It was time to go and lie down. We travelled back in silence, apart from Zhai Xiao Ming’s horn, beeping everything out of her way.

  Our next journey was to Hangzhou. This is where Poppy thought Father Hugh had been based when he found ‘my’ hedgehog, so it was possible that the city’s natural history museum might hold a key bit of evidence. She explained that, over the years, the ‘English’ – or Pinyin – version of many names had changed and Hankow had become Hangzhou.

  But before we could do that there was one more visit to be made. Early the next morning we made our way back to the Feng Le market. We had spent a long time discussing what we should do if we found hedgehog for sale. It is a very tricky area of debate. Having saved Dora, we were feeling filled with indignation at the treatment of hedgehogs and talked about buying the ones we found and heading out to the hills in the hope of releasing them far enough from human interference, all before catching a train at 8.20 a.m. But I was troubled by this: while it felt a good thing to do, there was a problem. If we turned up and started buying all the hedgehogs we saw, we would be seriously distorting the market. People would see that hedgehogs sold well (and over the odds if they were going to us) and try all the more to catch them. Therefore, reluctantly, we decided that we would have to just interview anyone we found with hogs, take photographs and then go. Leaving the hedgehogs to a pretty grim future.

  We got a taxi to the market at 6.30. Poppy waited where we had been told the hedgehogs would be, if there were any, and I walked through the rest of the market, taking photos and searching for spiky beasts. I must have been doing something wrong when I said ‘ci wei ’. Even when I tried so very hard to follow the instructions – first vowel is fourth tone, that is, descending, and the beginning has a subtle ‘t’ before the sibilant opening – I still got nothing but blank looks. Back down to the boxes of eels, nothing, not one spine to be seen. So I weaved my way back to Poppy, through puddles of blood and piles of entrails.

  She had also drawn a blank. The person who occasionally came with hedgehogs was not there and in fact had not been seen for quite some time. I felt simultaneous waves of relief and disappointment.

  But I had missed something quite out of the ordinary. A man had arrived at the front of the market, squatted down, unwrapped a bundle and pulled out a stone. A fairly ordinary stone, about 30 centimetres across, that had one distinguishing feature, a pale impression of a cow. Poppy had a look. It seemed like a natural blemish. But who would buy a stone? She watched and listened, and within five minutes he had sold it for seventy yuan.

  Hangzhou’s museum of natural history deserves a special place in all guidebooks to the region. You must visit; there are sights within that will confound you and there are sights that will truly shock you. Oh, and there is a hedgehog. In fact, there is more than one; there is a mother with four babies.

  In the corner of a case they were there among some unlikely companions: a pangolin, a tapir, a kangaroo and a rabbit. No more information than the Chinese symbols for ‘ci wei’ made this rather frustrating. Which species was it? Where was it from? By pressing my nose against the glass, I could make out another piece of paper tucked under the hog’s rump. Perhaps this might hold some answers.

  Wu Yan was on duty and she was so helpful, eventually tracking down a professor who had the authority to enter the case, though we were not allowed in. He lifted the label and held it up to the window for us to read. Surprisingly the label said ‘Erinaceus europaeus’, the European hedgehog, as found pottering around my garden in Oxford. It was hard to tell through the glass, as the beast looked very old and dusty, but it could have been. So why did the label say the specimen was found in China? It continued: ‘Active in hedges, eats insects, small birds, birds eggs, frog skin, snakes, wild fruit, fungi, eats pests. Stomach and skin can be medically used.’ Now, I had heard about this from Liu Daming, but it was interesting to see it referred to in the museum. Not that anyone there could enlighten us as to how hedgehogs are used.

  Later we did track down some information, which Poppy translated: ‘It [the hedgehog] is used to cure “the five haemorrhoids”. For persistent diarrhoea the hedgehog skin should be roasted . . . and then ground into a fine powder. For seminal emission hedgehog skin should be roasted and add flowery dragon bone, ground together into a fine powder. Use honey to roll them into round pills – as big as small beans.’ There was also a recipe for curing a bad stomach, though you might think that would be the result of the remedy.

  When I got back to the UK and asked around the Traditional Chinese Medicine community I was met with an absolute and rather defensive reaction. In the UK there are no animal parts used, legitimately at least, in TCM, and when a teacher from the register of Chinese Herbal Medicine, Tony Booker, scoured the archives, he could find no references to hedgehogs. Worms and turtles, yes, but not hedgehogs.

  I also found out that Hankow had not changed its name and is in fact still very happily existing not a million miles from where we had been. So next time Poppy comes back to London she is going to buy me as lovely a meal as Chinatown has to offer in compensation.

  Back in Beijing, I met some human Hedgehogs. The two members of Hedgehog, Shi Lu and Zi Jian, aka Atom and ZO, were a disgrace to the stereotype of noisy pop stars. You could not imagine a more delightful and polite couple of people to share lunch with. Atom was around 1.50 metres tall, delicate and powerful. She was unlike any other rock drummer I had met. Her collaborator, ZO, was a tall and nervously thin guitarist.

  Their career to date has seen them needing to retain their day jobs. But their second album, Noise Hit World, launched towards the end of 2007, was with a leading Indy label, so perhaps their brand of NoisePoP will allow them to fulfil their dreams of going full-time. Even since I met them, their presence has expanded on the web, where you can get to hear the NoisePoP as loud as you wish. Their CD is an unlikely regular on my hi-W and I am beginning to find it strangely endearing.

  Why did they call themselves Hedgehog? There is disagreement about the name. Atom is concerned: ‘A hedgehog is a spiritual animal, a special animal that is treated with respect, so it feels a little wrong, maybe presumptuous, to call ourselves that.’

  But ZO was undeterred and in fact saw a reflection of himself in the hedgehog. ‘It is a very individual animal,’ he explained. ‘And if it doesn’t want to interact with the world, it retreats into its protective coat. But he can be very friendly if he want
s. Sometimes I just don’t want to talk to people and I can be just like that. I retreat and get rather prickly. But the main reason why I like the hedgehog is that this is a small animal that really knows how to look after itself.’

  ‘But we must not ignore the fact that it is a spiritual animal,’ Atom insisted. ‘Like the fox and the weasel, you must not hurt it unnecessarily. My uncle told me that if he was outside and a fox suddenly appeared and looked at him, he would know that he was going to receive bad luck. But I don’t think that the hedgehog is quite such an omen.’

  Hedgehogs remain portentous in China, just like they were in Britain before the arrival of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle. I wonder if a Chinese Beatrix Potter is ready to help shift opinions.

  A bit of digging when I got home revealed an article in a 1948 edition of the journal Folklore: ‘On the Cult of the Four Sacred Animals in the Neighbourhood of Peking’. Atom was absolutely right that there is a deep attachment to hedgehogs in this part of China. Foxes, weasels and snakes are the other be-culted beasts. The pai-men (the hedgehog family) is treated with great reverence and linked with the God of Wealth. And the review of beliefs throws new light on the age-old question of why there are so many hedgehogs squashed on the road. Hedgehogs are attempting to facilitate their spiritual journey to nirvana. ‘When a certain stage on the way to perfection is reached, the hedgehog will be compelled by its own soul-power (ling-hsing) to lay itself down on the road in the tracks of vehicles out of longing for being crushed by the wheels.’

  So how does such a reverence for the animal sit with a desire to slice it up for medicine? Atom had a thought on this: ‘Chinese medicine has a long history. Maybe the superstitions of people without much education have infected the practice so that they would use the hedgehog, disregarding the tradition of respect.’

  Poppy explained to them what we had been doing and how we had found a hedgehog for sale in Anhui Province. ZO asked what the hedgehog was being sold for and we explained that it was probably food or medicine. He thought for moment and concluded, ‘Well, we won’t be playing in Anhui then.’

  As Hedgehog zoomed off to their other lives as mere mortals, it dawned on me that time was accelerating. In thirty-six hours I would be on a plane home. Despite this being such a short trip I really felt that I had achieved quite a lot. I had found a hedgehog, rescued a hedgehog, had lunch with two Hedgehogs and found a stuffed family in a museum.

  On my last full day we headed to Beijing Zoo. As we scoured the place I noticed a small office: Wild China. I had been in touch with them when trying to find a guide earlier in the year and wondered whether Lihong Shi might be around. She has established a wonderful enterprise. Not only does she run a film company specializing in the wildlife of China, but she has also set up a project with Zhi Nong Xi, an internationally respected and award-winning wildlife photographer, to teach conservation workers how to take photographs.

  They were in – apparently a rare thing, as they are so busy. This spontaneous meeting was amazingly timed. Zhi Nong Xi had just received a photograph from one of his students. Well, a very mature student, in that Mr Ai Huaisen is the senior warden at the Gaoligonghsan Nature Reserve in Yunnan Province. It was of a hedgehog and this was the perfect chance to see if I could identify which species.

  As the image appeared on the screen I gave an involuntary gasp. This was something so very different from anything I had seen in China so far. In fact, I had never seen a photograph like it; the dark-tipped spines were so distinctive. This could be nothing other than Hemiechinus hughi. Hugh’s hedgehog had been photographed. I was so excited that I forgot I had wanted the honour of capturing this image. It meant that the distribution map I had been using was off by over 1,600 kilometres in terms of the southern extent of hughi ’s range. I was due to leave the country in a little over thirty hours and the hedgehog had been found in a reserve that was four hours’ drive away from a railway station that was forty-six hours away from where I was. So that was that. Hugh’s hedgehog was still extant, but there was no way I could get to it before my flight. I felt a wave of calm resignation. I had got pretty far down the road to hughi and now I had a much better idea of where to start should I come to China again.

  We chatted some more and I found out useful information about Professor Wang Song as well. He was not ignoring me; he had retired and was spending his time as far from his desk as possible, travelling to nature reserves all over the country, enjoying himself, but as busy as he ever was while officially employed. Reminds me rather of my mentor, Pat Morris, now retired and busier than ever.

  We parted fondly. I had really warmed to the team of Wild China. They even put in a call to track down a keeper to tell us more about the zoo’s hedgehogs. Yang Yi was enthusiastic, but not a specialist. His world revolved around the red pandas, very distant relations to the rather overexposed monochrome variety. He took us to a dark concrete building and showed us an enclosure. The argumentative giant flying squirrel prevented us entering to get a closer look at the two hedgehogs hunkered down in the corner. The sign said ‘Erinaceus europaeus’, but they were clearly different from ‘our’ hog. I asked Yang Yi where they had come from: they had been found in the grounds of the zoo. They are seen in May and June, early in the mornings or late at night, snuffling in the undergrowth surrounded by the staggering development of this enormous city.

  I have written to the zoo explaining that their label is wrong and have also made a few suggestions as to how to improve the welfare of these poor captives. I hope that they have taken note, as it is a shame to see animals treated with such scant regard for their welfare in the twenty-first century.

  And now I was done I suddenly realized how tired I was. I returned to the hostel, packed, and headed off for a last supper with Poppy. The food, oh, the food was stunning: young bamboo, egg and jasmine flowers, wood ear fungus and palm hearts, red cabbage and spring onions, mint salad, kohlrabi and buckwheat noodles, all washed down with Yanjing beer. The flavours and textures combined to create one of the most extraordinarily amazing meals I have ever experienced. It was a fitting farewell to Poppy and the city.

  As I collapsed into the uncomfortable plane seat I was hit by a wave of disappointment. I had failed. I had known that this was a lunatic challenge, but I had hoped. Still, at least I had met and held a Chinese hedgehog. Dear Dora, I hope she managed to survive the hostilities of her home. Strange that was the very first time I had ever ‘owned’ a wild animal. Just such a shame that she was not hughi. And then, in spite of the hum of the plane and the numbing tiredness, I had a moment of inspiration.

  These are rare events and it generated a crackling energy through my body that threatened to break the seat belt with the tension. When I went to meet Liu Daming and bought Dora, I had her in my possession for a good fifteen minutes.

  And for that short time, there was no doubting the fact that she was Hugh’s hedgehog. I spent much of the journey grinning to myself, unable to share the news, but desperate to tell everyone.

  I had done it; sort of. I had found Hugh’s hedgehog.

  PART THREE

  Save the Hedgehog – Save the World

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  How We Can

  Look After

  Hedgehogs

  Can you imagine a world without hedgehogs? Would you notice the gaping void in your life if you never again heard the snuffling in your undergrowth? Perhaps it wouldn’t hit you immediately, but I am sure that an absence of hedgehogs would have a far more profound effect on us than the disappearance of pandas, tigers or whales.

  When, in 2007, the Environment Agency sought a new icon for its work in England and Wales it asked people to vote for the species or habitat that most represented their view of the natural world. Oak trees and bluebell woods, otters and robins all got nominated. But then someone added the hedgehog – and it became the runaway winner, defeating more obviously charismatic contenders. It is clear that hedgehogs are special to very many people. If they di
sappeared from this island, if such an everyday animal could be discarded, what would that mean for us? Would we see their demise as an alarm bell for our own precarious position?

  A hedgehog-free Britain isn’t going to happen any time soon, but there are grounds for concern. Hedgehogs are pretty robust critters. In some form or other they have been around since the appearance of mammals, with early versions nipping at the heels of the departing dinosaurs. They have survived ice ages, outlasted mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers and even managed to form a symbiotic relationship with those arch-predators, humans. But the headlines are clear: hedgehogs are under threat.

  The concern began, once again, because of Pat Morris. Starting in 1987, he undertook roadkill surveys. This has grown into the ‘Mammals on Roads’ project run by the Mammals Trust, where volunteers count corpses they see on specific journeys.

  This begs an interesting question. If lots of hedgehogs are seen on the road, does that mean there are few hedgehogs alive in the surrounding area as most have been killed, or that there are lots as there are so many available for the motorcar? Well, a single data point does not tell you much. But repeating the survey builds a picture of fluctuations in numbers – as long as hedgehogs do not suddenly learn to avoid cars, that is. It seems that the number of corpses correlates well with the number of hedgehogs: the more hedgehogs in an area, the more likely that squashed ones will be seen.

  Why do there seem to be so many hedgehogs killed? Are they killed more frequently than other species? Is it because they roll up when threatened rather than run away? I can actually answer some of these questions. The reason why we see so many hedgehogs is partly because of their spines. They last a lot longer as a reminder of the collision. The remnants of a rabbit are going to be pilfered away by a crow or gull, but the little Frisbee of prickles remains to haunt other travellers.