HEDGEHOGS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIII, Issue 20782, 17 July 1937, Page 13 (Supplement)

HEDGEHOGS

(By

J.H.H.)

At the Annual Meeting of the Wellington Acclimatisation Society the Chairman classed the humble hedgehog with the rat as “vermin.” Now it is admittedly difficult to find a good word to say for the rat, except, that, where people are slovenly and leave out scraps of meat and fish, he probably saves us from a plague of blow-flies; but the hedgehog is surely in a very different category. In a recent number of “Zoo,” the official organ of the Zoological Society of London the following statement Is made: “The Hedgehog can be very useful to farmers, because it will eat up so many different kinds of plantdestroying animals like worms, slugs, snails and beetle grubs. In fact the hedgehog does practically no harm, and to kill one is the depth of silliness.”

There are some people who think no creature is of any use unless you can either eat it, or shoot it or drag it about on a hook; but the Zoological Society is an impartial scientific body whose verdict on the hedgehog may be t ben as final. There are other people who are prepared to believe any ridiculous story such as that the hedgehog will suck the milk from a cow lying down in the paddock. It is true that if you put down a saucer of milk near a hedgehog, he has the good sense to make a bee-line for it; but that is a very different matter. Indeed, if you put some bread and milk down outside the kitchen door you may find a little “hedgie” coming regularly for his evening meal on spring and summer nights, and perhaps sharing it with the cat.

If you are a gardener it will pay you to be generous to any hedgehogs that may patronise your garden. Some

years ago pests of slugs and snails made it very difficult for me to grow cabbages and lettuces; but now thanks to the hedgehog, whose acquaintance I cultivate, a slug or snail is never to be found. A little bread and milk is a small price to pay.

It is true that I do not keep fowls. But even if I did, it would not be a difficult matter to see that their nesting places were out of reach of Mr Hedgehog, who has none of the agility of the rat or the weasel. If there are any eggs lying about the garden, there is no denying that one might furnish him with a meal.

The following story is authentic. A friend of mine was awakened one night by cries of pain in his garden. Taking a torch he proceeded to investigate and found a large hedgehog apparently trying to bite off one of the legs of a little hedgehog, who was crying “murder.” A closer investigation showed that the little hedgehog had got one of his legs entangled in a long twitch grass, and turning round and round to free itself, had got into a worse mess still. The big hedgehog, evidently its parent, so far from wanting to eat it, was nibbling hard at the twitch to set it free. When my friend had cut and unwound the tight bonds, mother and child trotted off with little hoots of joy.

“If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, motley and warm. When the hedgehog travels furtively across the lawn, Will they say, 'He strove that such Innocent creatures should come to no harm. But he could do little for them; and now he is gone.’” —Thomas Hardy—“ Afterwards.”