by Hugh Warwick
And this is not entirely altruistic. I believe that we are ignoring a very important point: hedgehogs can help us a great deal. We have already seen how individuals benefit enormously from immersing themselves in the world of hedgehogs. But I am sure that this benefit is not exclusively the preserve of hedgehog carers. There is a tendency to overestimate our understanding of the everyday and to underestimate its importance. There is much we can all gain from hedgehogs.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
How Hedgehogs
Can Save
the World
Some animals are charismatic. And of these a bunch known as the ‘charismatic mega-fauna’ get most of the attention. They are the poster children for international wildlife and environmental groups. Whether it is elephants, tigers or whales, these exquisite examples of evolution provide us with an opportunity to wonder at the beauty of the world. They can also be used as a warning. Do you love elephants? Well, people who trade in ivory are killing them, so you are killing them if you buy an ivory trinket on holiday.
And it works. Pandas may be an evolutionary dead end, doomed to extinction, but they are cute and they rake in the donations. Yet none of these animals are approachable. They may be charismatic, but they are distant, like supermodels. Yes, Kate Moss is aesthetically very pleasing, but there is no way I am going to get to know her. And if I did, do you think we would become friends? The same goes for elephants – beautiful, awe-inspiring, but very few people are going to get to know them. And they have some pretty bad habits too – hooligan teenagers destroying their home patch.
So, I would argue, we need to put these unobtainable beauties to one side and get realistic about our chances of finding true love. Because this is what we need. Love and compassion for nature are the best way to ensure we all, humans and animals, continue to survive on our one and only planet.
Remember, the only way you will get under the skin of a live tiger is if it eats you. And who needs tigers when it is possible to get under the skin of one of the most charismatic of creatures? An animal that is an icon for a country’s wildlife; an animal so mundane that we barely give it a second thought until we notice it is gone; an animal that we can all have a chance of meeting. Like the girl or boy next door, the hedgehog is what true love is all about.
Getting moved and becoming passionate are key to us all becoming more involved in creating the change we want to see, and in fact becoming the change we want to see, to steal a line from Gandhi.
We can love a hedgehog like no other animal. It is the first and probably only wild animal that we urbanites and suburbanites have a chance of getting really close to. Feeding ducks doesn’t count – you can throw bread at them, but have you ever felt any sort of bond? No. But the hedgehog chooses to share the same space as us and if we are willing to change our point of view and get down on its level, we will be rewarded by the opening of a door into a deeper understanding of the natural world. Once the connection has been made, once we have had that chance to do the nose-to-nose thing and see the spark of wild in its eye, then we can follow it through into a new world view.
There is a magical piece of music by Thomas Adès called ‘Tevot’ that surges from chaos to order, then order builds into love and love takes on an almost ethereal nature. And that is what hedgehogs can do for us. The world may be confusing, there may be a bewilderment of signals coming our way, but one strong theme can take us by the hand and lead us to a sanctuary, to something close to enlightenment: a true love of the world around us. Incidentally, ‘Tevot’ is Hebrew for ‘ark’, as in Noah’s. Perhaps it will be the hedgehog that leads us aboard next time.
So we follow the hedgehog, if not up a ramp then at least its progress. We notice the dead on the road, but feel it a little more as we question the need for the journey that has dragged us into the car. We see the barrier that the road has become. Not the tarmac, actually quite attractive for a short-legged beast, but the business that speeds along. We see the countryside change, fields expanding, hedges fading; we see suburbia change, gardens shrinking, traffic increasing. We are being gently guided to think a little bit more about the way we lead our lives. That is what is great in a new relationship: you get an opportunity to look at your own life through the eyes of your new significant other. We are most willing to change ourselves in the grip of true love.
True love, not the sort that tends to infect our appreciation of the natural world. I have run a workshop called ‘Sentimentality: The Enemy of Ecology’. Sentimental love is superficial; it does not offer much. Bubblegum love. A sentimental affection can cause blindness to what is real. A sentimental reaction to the culling of hedgehogs on the Uists would be a simple refusal to accept it under any circumstances. If there had been clear evidence that a cull would have been more humane, then I would have had to support it.
That is not to say that sentimentality is without its uses. My love of nature began sentimentally – being attracted to the charismatic mega-fauna. I had a large poster of a tiger above my bed for many years. There was no way I could engage with a tiger. I wanted to work with animals, though, and have ended up allowing that sentimentality to lead me to something more profound. The risk with sentimentality is that it becomes a gluey swamp that binds in an unfulfilled state – and if we are not careful, the path out of the swamp is the one lit by the neon excess of consumerism.
Hedgehogs have more to teach us than an appreciation of the wild. A philosopher friend wondered if I had heard of Schopenhauer. Being more philistine than philosopher I admitted my ignorance and was introduced to the ‘Hedgehog’s Dilemma’. The idea is straightforward, if biologically not very accurate.
Two hedgehogs want to be together to share their love. However, the closer they get to each other, the more they hurt each other. They back away, but begin to feel lonely, so they move closer again until it hurts. And such is the dilemma: how can the hedgehogs be close enough together to share their love without causing pain?
Schopenhauer was not a biologist. If he had bothered to watch courting hedgehogs, he would have seen how they overcome the obvious obstacles to reproduction. I have mentioned the circling war of attrition already. When the time comes for the female to relent, she lets the male in by relaxing her spines and arching her back, with her head pointing up and her undercarriage slipping from beneath the skirt of spines. And while the male may have a prodigious penis (for his size), he is always aware that no means no. She can end the process with a frown.
Schopenhauer was interested in human relationships. How can someone get close enough to the one they love without causing pain, while at the same time not being so far away as to feel the pang of loneliness?
This got me thinking. What is the biggest, most all-encompassing relationship we have? I would argue that it is with the world around us. And I believe that humanity is suffering from the hedgehog’s dilemma in this most vital of bonds.
We want to be close to the natural world – I would go so far as to say we need that contact. But if we get too close, we destroy it: we trample it; we take too much of the good out and dump too much of our bad in. And if we retreat from the natural world, into cities or industrialized agricultural landscapes, we become bereft, lonely. We become so disconnected from our roots that we easily forget the value of the natural world and accelerate its destruction.
The dilemma we face is in trying to get close enough to the wild without corrupting it out of existence.
The year 2008 is a big one for the planet. Not just because it marks the centenary of the identification of hughi, but because it is the year that the majority of humans will be living within urban environments for the first time. Removed from the natural world as never before, we have become an urban species. In just a few short generations we have gone from predominantly rural to mostly urban. And it was only a few moments earlier, on an evolutionary clock, that we were hunter-gatherers, eking out an existence as part of the natural world.
Is that separation anythi
ng to worry about? Should we be bothered by progress? Well, these arguments always sell better if you make it black and white. But I am an ecologist and I know that life is never so simple.
Progress is great. Separation from the elements and from the diseases and predators in the natural world is wonderful and I love my iPod. But too little connection with the wild is not a good thing. The hedgehog’s dilemma is not just theoretical. We lose something very important. All those hundreds of thousands of years as hunter-gatherers have left their mark inside each and every one of us. There was a set of environmental criteria that improved the chances of our prehistoric self surviving and they are somehow ingrained in our DNA. Like the tern, with its migration route map, we cannot point to the ‘gene for’, but there is something hard-wired into our make-up: ‘biophilia’.
Edward Wilson, who developed this idea, defines biophilia as ‘the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms. Innate means hereditary and hence part of ultimate human nature.’ He describes how we have a dependency on the natural world in excess of our basic physical needs; that it extends to our aesthetic, intellectual and emotional needs as well.
This is an idea that has been picked up by many important thinkers and writers, such as Richard Mabey. His beautiful book, Nature Cure, charts his emergence from a painful depression, drawn out of his slough thanks to an active, sensual re-engagement with nature.
And can’t we all feel that gladdening of the heart when we find ourselves embraced by nature? I know that I will feel better if I get out of the city and immerse myself in a bit of wild. It does not have to be much, but I know it works and I know I am not alone. A report published in 2007 for the RSPB called Natural Thinking presented evidence that contact with nature and green space has a very positive effect on our mental health. And American author Richard Louv has taken Wilson’s idea further, identifying ‘nature-deficit disorder’ as a condition that afflicts our modern selves. I can really appreciate that phrase – it makes utter sense. I can feel the tension in my shoulders and behind my eyes ease as effectively as a deep-tissue massage when I climb the hill that looks over a beach in Gower, South Wales, and just allow the wind and the sky to knead me back into shape.
There have been very real benefits noted from this sort of ‘green cure’. Research shows that if you measure the recovery of people in a hospital – people receiving the same care for the same illness – the ones with a view of a brick wall get better more slowly than the ones with a view of trees or parkland. And there is plenty of evidence that the most sustainable response to depression is not drugs but exercise in a natural landscape.
Strangely, it seems that Feng Shui cottoned on to this earlier, much earlier. At least in some examples of this ancient art of furniture placement, there is a strong resonance with the natural world. Ignore the astrological bunkum and consider that the perfect Feng Shui home is situated on a slope, overlooking water in a rural scene. This is just like the perfect retreat for hunter-gatherers on the plains of east Africa, where humanity evolved. A slope would provide a view over savannah, a view towards the water where wildlife would congregate, a view that would present opportunities to see predators and prey.
I am sure it is no coincidence that Capability Brown’s trademark landscapes, such as the gardens surrounding Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, mimic this feel as well.
Hedgehogs provide us with a way out of their dilemma. We cannot all live in a perfectly biophilic home – places like Blenheim are rare and unsurprisingly exclusive. But there is a way we can gain something of that contact with nature; meet some of those needs that lurk deep in our genes. The way is obvious: hedgehogs. They give us the opportunity to get close to the natural world. But this only works as long as we remain conscious of the impact we have on our guides. Hedgehogs can do more to foment change in our attitudes towards the environment than almost any other animal. It is only a short walk from thinking of the hedgehog as a rather cute garden visitor to realizing that the roads you drive on to the supermarket or the holidays you take all have an impact on your new-found friend. Busy roads bisect the land, fragmenting hedgehog habitat. Supermarkets demand centralized food production, which only becomes economic on a massive scale, with larger machines working larger fields, fields bereft of hedges. Hedgehogs are like spiny canaries, warning us of the explosive mix in the atmosphere.
The journey hedgehogs have led me on has taken me from a sentimental love of wildlife through a pragmatic desire to understand more and into something quite special. But there is no way I am unique in this. There is a gateway here to be stepped through by every one of us – just follow the busy little hedgehog, like Lucie did.
Lucie enters the world of the hedgehog and finds it warm, safe and industrious. We too can follow her lead, and if we catch a glimpse of something on a hillside, or hear a snuffle in our garden, why not take a chance? You might meet your very own Mrs Tiggy-Winkle. And while she will not be wearing an apron (though don’t get me started on the American pet hedgehogs, all dressed up in dolls’ clothes) and will, probably, not talk, I reckon we would all do well to stop and listen. So much can be said without words, so don’t be shy, get down on your hands and knees, lean forward and see what happens as you get nose to nose with a hedgehog. Relish and wallow in the moment of making a connection with the most charismatic creature on the planet. Look into those wild hedgehog eyes and, if you are lucky, catch a glimpse of a special something, a spark that can change your entire life.
Hedgehog-friendly Organizations
If you find a sick or injured hedgehog, and you want to help, the best bet is to get in touch with one of the many experts around the country. There is a county by county list on the British Hedgehog Preservation Society’s website – and also details of regional contacts on their answerphone.
British Hedgehog Preservation
Society Hedgehog House, Dhuston, Ludlow, Shropshire SY8 3PL
01584 890801
www.britishhedgehogs.org.uk
The BHPS website also has a host of other useful information about ways you can improve the lot of hedgehogs in your area – and even a guide to how to care for a sick hedgehog if you are brave enough to go down that path.
People who have gone down that path are Gay and Andy Christie from Hessilhead. They are not set up for visitors, but they do have an open day each year. So if you are in the area at the right time, it is well worth a visit – a truly inspirational place. And you can get an indication of the amount of work they do by having a look at Gay’s diary on their website.
Hessilhead Wildlife Rescue Trust, Gateside, Beith, Scotland
KAI5 1HT
01505 502415
www.hessilheadwildlife.org.uk
Les Stocker’s Tiggywinkles empire is open to the public and well worth a visit – and do not forget the hedgehog museum either. Details of how to get there are on the website, or give them a call.
Tiggywinkles, The Wildlife Hospital Trust, Aston Road, Haddenham, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire HP17 8AF UK
01844 292292
www.sttiggywinkles.org.uk
Caroline Gould at Vale gives a clear indication of just what goes into running such a centre with her blog.
Vale Wildlife Rescue, Station Road, Beckford, Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire GL20 7AN
01386 882288
www.vwr.org.uk
But there is much more to hedgehogs than just patching them up. One of the best points of contact for conservation and research about hedgehogs is the People’s Trust for Endangered Species – and the associated Mammals Trust. These are the people, along with scientists like Pat Morris, who are looking into the problems hedgehogs face and trying to identify solutions.
People’s Trust for Endangered Species and the Mammals Trust, 15 Cloisters House, 8 Battersea Park Road, London
SW8 4BG
020 7498 4533
www.ptes.org
And if you were intrigued at the idea of hedgehog pet keeping, then the
IHA is a good place to start looking for more information. Run in part by Standing Bear, it can link you through to discussion forums where you can have a look at the sorts of issues confronting pet keepers, and will hopefully put you off trying to get started with pet hedgehogs in the UK.
International Hedgehog Association
www.hedgehogclub.com