Hedgehogs: do we need to keep them as pets?

Pete Wedderburn
Pete Wedderburn qualified as a vet twenty-five years ago, and now spends half his working life writing newspaper columns. He lives in Ireland with his wife, two daughters and a menagerie of dogs, cats, poultry and other furry and feathered companions.

There’s something strangely charming about hedgehogs, and in recent years, they’re being kept as pets, rather than just being appreciated from a distance as wild creatures in the garden.

Fuzzypeg is a typical example. She’s an African Pygmy Hedgehog, and she was bought in a pet shop, along with her large plastic cage, a small “igloo” home, a food bowl, water bottle and litter tray. She’s litter trained, like a cat, and she can be let out of her cage to run around the house. She moves more quickly that you’d imagine, running so rapidly, like a ferret, that it’s difficult to catch her. She likes to crawl into small openings, so when she’s out she needs to be watched carefully, or she might be found later, wedged down the back of the sofa or inside a cupboard if a door had been left ajar.

Fuzzypeg has some unusual behaviours typical of her species: when she comes across something strange (such as a new toy), she licks it and nibbles it, then she goes through a process called “anointing”. She produces saliva, getting foam all over her face, and then goes into a type of trance, rolling on her side, with the foam spreading all over her head. It’s supposed to be a hedgehog’s way of acquiring the same scent as environmental objects, so that they are camouflaged from predators in the area.

Fuzzypeg doesn’t bark or miaow, but she clatters around the place in an ungraceful and noisy way, waking up her owners in the early hours with the noise. She does vocalize if she feels stressed, curling up into a tight ball, letting out a loud sound like “white noise”, and twitching. It’s an effective way of seeing off predators: a prickly ball, hopping up and down and going “whoagh, whoagh, whoagh” is something that most animals don’t want to get close to.

I’m a traditionalist when it comes to pets: sometimes it seems that new species are promoted as pets for reasons of novelty and as crowd-pleasers rather than for their value as pleasing companions. But, then again, I’m quite sure that there are many hedgehog keepers out there would claim that there’s nothing quite like the company of a small hedgehog…

There is nothing like the company of a small hedgehog i agree . The fact is the African Hedgehog is out there and we need to promote and educate people on how they should be kept .x