28/05/2023
Please read this and SHARE.
This is not to criticise anyone, just to educate people.
When you find a hedgehog laid, wobbling, limping on your lawn, pathway, road in the DAY, please pick it up with a towel and put it in a HIGH SIDED Box 📦 a shoe box is NOT a suitable size. As sick as the animal may look, it can and will probably get out.
THEN phone a rescue for advice, because in the last 2 weeks alone I’ve had 5 calls about wobbly sick looking hedgehogs 🦔 that the finder thinks needs help. Which is fabulous, but by the time they’ve Googled a rescue, phoned or messaged and sometimes had to wait for a reply the hedgehog has gone. Please bear in mind most rescues are independent, self funded places and to fund this, the kind person running it has a full time job. Sadly, we don’t run like the RSPCA with immediate response.
In a lot of cases we get calls that the hedgehog has now ‘gone’ and there’s nothing really we can do. Chances are it will go to another garden, road etc and be over-looked and die that day or in some cases a few days afterwards in pain from it’s affliction.
On very rare occasions, it is found days later alive, but has been attacked by birds (they peck their eye) or flies have laid eggs on it, which turn into maggots within the day usually.
Please please please don’t leave them under a bush, on the lawn, or in a shoe box while searching for help. They need a HIGH sided box, then call the rescue.
These little creatures are getting rarer and dwindling at an alarming rate. We feel the loss of every cold, lifeless hedgehog brought to us. Some have been poisoned, been trapped in snares, stuck on bait tapes (I know you don’t use poison or your neighbour, but Joe Bloggs 20 streets away does) hedgehogs can travel up to a mile a night in search of food. Hence the need for hedgehog highways to keep them away from the roads. A 13cm or cd size hole is perfect 🤩
If you can do one thing today to help a hedgehog out there, SHARE this post. We don’t get any money from this, but we can potentially save a lot more hedgehogs 🦔 up and down the country.
Thank you and sorry if it has been a difficult read. 🦔❤️🩹🦸🏼♀️