Going the whole hog: a lifetime fond of hedgehogs

My acquaintance with the hedgehog began at an early age. We lived in a big old house with a large garden entirely surrounded by a brick wall, so harmless animals we wished to keep as pets could be safely given the run of the entire place.

As the fowl were kept in runs, my father always liked to have a hedgehog or two running loose to keep down slugs, snails and caterpillars, which they did so effectively that we often collected bags of snails elsewhere to add to their diet. They soon became quite tame and used to come to the back door at night to consume saucers of bread and milk that were placed there for them.

The cellars, the lobsters and the art of keeping game

The house had the best run of cellars of any in which I’ve lived. These, and the kitchen, harboured great numbers of cockroaches. In the summer and autumn the hedgehogs were collected periodically and given the freedom of the ground floor for two or three days, during which time they made an effective clearance of these pests.

Looking back at those days in cold blood, I wonder we ever kept a “domestic” for much longer than a week. As well as an endless run of pets, which included a pelican that was kept loose in the garden and would sometimes come into the kitchen, my father had several rather odd practices, which would hardly commend themselves today.

One of these was a habit of bringing home live lobsters, which he would turn loose in the coal cellar. Here, they remained quite healthy for two or three days. It was a source of great excitement when he went to find a lobster in a pitch-dark cellar with the aid of a candle – needless to say, oil lamps and candles were our only source of illumination. It was no easy matter to retrieve a creature almost the same colour as the coal from some hollow in which it was ensconced.

Occasionally, to our intense joy, our parent would trip over a lump and drop the candlestick and utter forbidden words as he stumbled about in the dark, striking matches to relight it.

Incidentally, he had one cellar in which he reduced the art of keeping game to a perfection I never can hope to meet again. In these days of refrigerators and other gadgets, it is rarely that I get a bird in the state to which all Father’s were brought – absolutely tender with just the suspicion of highness. I get an odd bird that recalls the past, but it always seems to me a fluke I cannot hope to repeat, like a high duck flighting in the late dusk.

Hedgehogs had only one drawback as pets: fleas. But as they did not leave them unless they were handled, they were not held as of much account. I have never known an animal so infested with fleas as the hedgehog, with the exception of one or two bats.

A hedgehog with a regular beat

Though the hedgehog wanders freely at times, it is usually of fairly regular habits, and sometimes has a fixed beat. When some years ago I lived in a cottage in the country, I used to treacle posts in a big disused chalk pit at the bottom of the garden to attract moths. I went around these the first time in the evening of late dusk and in June one year I met a half-grown hedgehog, just at the mouth of the pit.

For the rest of the year to the end of October, I always met this individual, who grew steadily, in the same place, at the same period of dusk, which suggested that he had a regular beat he began to patrol at a certain hour. I left the house that winter, so I do not know if he reappeared in the spring.

What a newborn hedgehog looks like

Here, hedgehogs are common and are frequently found run over by cars, even in completely built-up areas. The newborn hedgehog is a curious little creature. A few years ago, my golden cocker was found making furious attempts to get under an old disused beehive in the garden. So I shifted it and found underneath a large female hedgehog and five newborns. They were almost cylindrical in shape and looked as if they had been cut out of raw meat with rudimentary prickles scarcely visible on the back.

I replaced the hive and put some saucers of bread and milk under it. In a few days the infants changed shape to become like tiny specimens of the adult, but with pinkish skin and soft white bristles.

Hedgehogs, partridge nests and the odd badger

I am quite fond of hedgehogs. And though I know that they make short work of a nest of partridge eggs if they come across them – anyone who has seen a hedgehog crack a big snail cannot doubt this – most partridges are so “grubbed and stubbed”. As I think it most unlikely that the hedgehog would find any of the three or four nests in a 20-acre grass field, I invariably call off my spaniel and move on, when she turns one out in the hedge bank.

The hedgehog does not have many natural enemies in this country except badger and fox. Some weeks ago, my friend Mr Sparrow, the well-known veterinary surgeon at Rockford, heard a hideous noise on his lawn at about 2am. He went downstairs and switched on the lights and saw a large badger only 10ft away nosing a hedgehog.

The badger, of course, bolted and Mr Sparrow, to make certain which animal was making the noise, prodded the hedgehog with the corner of a broom. The hedgehog was apparently unhurt and wandered off later of its own accord.

This article by HC Huggins was first published in the 1 September 1951 issue of Shooting Times.