Slugs and snails and Puppy Dog tails

Your average Hedgehog is a walking dustbin. They will eat pretty much anything that their little noses manage to sniffle out. They have an incredible sense of smell and can detect a beetle or an earthworm under 3 inches of soil. Spend time on a summer evening watching and you'll see even the babies digging like fury to unearth some appetising morsel. Now please note, I said appetising.

At this point we have to consider, just how appetising is a slug? If you've ever accidentally grabbed one whilst gardening you will be familiar with what is known round here as "YUK! Slug Juice!", that awful slimy stuff that you just can't get rid of once it's on your hands. Now with that in mind, would you fancy eating one? No, me neither and funnily enough, hedgehogs prefer other things too. Not that those other things are any more inviting to us, but then we're not hedgehogs.

The food chart below shows the natural diet of a hedgehog and slugs and snails feature way down the list. Don't get me wrong, Hogs will eat them but the less they eat the better. Why? Because we humans like to remove slugs from our gardens and the way we tend to do that is by liberally sprinkling slug pellets around. The slugs eat it, the hedgehog eats the slug, and the rescue centre ends up with one very sick hog.

Slugs also carry the intermediate stage of lungworm. When a hog picks this up it can be life threatening, resulting in pneumonia and rapid death.

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