Found a hedgehog: when it needs help — and when you have to leave it be

There is a hedgehog in the garden. It is broad daylight, it barely moves, and you are standing there not knowing whether to do something or whether you are about to pull a wild animal out of its life for no reason. I get this question every autumn, and it is a fair one: both are possible.

The sentence you find everywhere — and why it falls short

Look up what a found hedgehog means and within seconds you hit the one sentence: A hedgehog out during the day is ill. As a rule of thumb it is not bad. As a diagnosis it is wrong.

The Igelzentrum Zürich, which has done nothing but assess hedgehogs for decades, says so explicitly: „not every daytime hedgehog is ill" (in German). In spring, males look for females in daylight. In late summer, hedgehog mothers carry nesting material whenever they get the chance. In autumn, young animals are under time pressure and eat whenever there is something to find — including at midday.

So the question is not whether it is out during the day. The question is what it is doing while it is. A hedgehog walking purposefully, sniffing, and disappearing as you come closer is getting on with its work. One lying listlessly in one spot, staggering in circles, or stretching out in the sun instead of hiding is not.

The signs that need no weighing up

There is a handful of observations at which the deliberation ends. If one of them applies, the animal belongs in expert hands — today, not tomorrow:

• Fly eggs or maggots. Small white grains that look like rice, usually in wounds or around eyes, ears and bottom. Flies that persistently circle an animal are a warning sign too. This is the most urgent finding of all: eggs become maggots within hours.
• Visible injuries — bite marks, cuts from strimmers or mowers, limping or trailing legs.
• Staggering, swaying, walking in circles.
• It no longer curls up. A healthy hedgehog forms the classic ball in your hands. One that cannot manage that any more has no strength left for it.
• Rattling breath or coughing, watery droppings, an animal that looks long and drawn with a set-off head and sunken flanks.

This list does not come from my own practice but from people who assess hundreds of hedgehogs a year. I pass it on as it stands.

The test that works without any experience

If everything else leaves you uncertain, there is one check that is reliable even without prior knowledge. Pick the animal up with gloves and lay your hand on its belly.

If the belly feels distinctly colder than your hand, the hedgehog is hypothermic. And that changes the order of everything you do next.

A hypothermic animal must not be fed first. In that state its digestion has all but stopped; food sits there and makes matters worse rather than better. Warmth comes first — a hot water bottle wrapped in a cloth, something it can lie on but also crawl off. Only once the belly feels warm does food make any sense at all.

Few people know this order, and it is the most common well-meant mistake: putting a bowl of food in front of an animal that is in no state to use it.

The weight that matters in autumn

From September on, a second question arises, and it is one of arithmetic: will this animal make it through the winter?

Hedgehogs survive hibernation on their own fat reserves. The Igelzentrum Zürich gives 500 to 600 grams as the weight at which young hedgehogs can go into hibernation. Roughly:

• Over 500 grams: the animal has what it needs. Leave it alone.
• 300 to 500 grams in late autumn: a borderline case. Feeding in the garden may be enough — discuss it with a hedgehog rescue.
• Under 300 grams once it turns cold: this animal will not manage on its own.

A kitchen scale will do. A towel in a bowl, weigh the bowl, hedgehog in, subtract — that is the whole science.

Incidentally, a hedgehog's hibernation is a different thing from a tortoise's, even though both look the same from outside. How different the rules are there I have written up in my article on the tortoise going into hibernation.

Milk is the worst thing you can give

It has persisted for generations: the saucer of milk for the hedgehog. It is well meant and does real harm.

Hedgehogs cannot tolerate lactose. What follows is diarrhoea — and diarrhoea finishes a weakened, already dehydrated animal faster than the hunger you wanted to relieve. The same goes for cat milk, for diluted milk, for anything from that corner.

What is right is unspectacular:

• Water, in a shallow dish. Always.
• Cat or dog food with a high meat content, without sauce or jelly. At room temperature, not from the fridge.
• No fruit, no bread, no nuts, no raisins, no kitchen scraps.

Why you may not simply keep it

The hedgehog is a protected wild animal in Switzerland, and in much of Europe besides — the details of the law differ from country to country, the principle does not. Taking one in is allowed where it needs help, but as an exception, for the duration of that need, and with the job of getting expert help as fast as possible. Not as a decision to keep an animal.

That is not a formality. Bringing a hedgehog through the winter is work you have to have learned: weight curves, parasite treatment, winter quarters cold enough to be worth the name, and at the end a release in the right place at the right time. Hedgehog rescues do this hundreds of times a year. A cardboard box in a warm living room prevents hibernation rather than enabling it.

So make the call before you make plans — to a hedgehog rescue near you, or to your veterinary practice, which will know the way there. Until you reach somebody: warm, dark, quiet, water alongside. No television, no stroking, no children looking into the box every ten minutes. A hedgehog is not a pet, and attention is stress to it.

What interests me about this question

What I like about the hedgehog question is how honestly it shows what helping is actually about: not doing something, but refraining from the right thing.

Most of the hedgehogs I am asked about need nothing. They need a garden where leaves are allowed to lie, a corner that does not get mown, a fence with a gap in it, and nobody picking them up. That is unspectacular, and it is worth more than any bowl of food.

And that is exactly what my work with dogs, cats and horses is about too: look first, then act. What that means day to day I have written up in my article on holistic veterinary medicine — when it makes sense, and where conventional medicine remains indispensable.