Grasping a prickly issue

Press, 2 March 1982, Page 18

Grasping a prickly issue

Hedgehogs have suffered frorti bad public relations. Shakespeare, in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” coupled hedgehogs with spotted snakes and demanded that both stay away from the Fairy Queen. In “Macbeth” the whine of the “hedge-pig” was a sign to the witches to start brewing. Hedgehog lines were given to such minor parts as “First Fairy” and “Second Witch.” In “The Tempest,” Caliban complained that Prospero’s spirits sometimes locked “like hedgeghogs, which lie tumbling in my barefoot way.” Thomas Hardy wrote slightingly of a “nocturnal blackness" when “the hedgehog travels furtively ' over , the lawn.”, Lewis Car roll found a use, for hedgehogs. In Wonderland they served, rolled up, as croquet balls. Before Alice could play a shot with her flamingo mallet, however, the “ball” pnrolled and tried to crawl away. Later, two of the “balls” had a fight and John Tennibl put an inept-looking hedgehog among the jurymen (who were tipped out of their seats by Alice) in one of his illustrations. '■ . Even naturalists berate the hedgehog. The creatures are accused of gluttony, drinking as much as one-eighth of their own volume at a session — and then staggering when they try to walk. For centuries, farmers in Britain have blamed hedgehogs for drinking milk from the udders of reclining cows, and vets in recent times have supported them by reporting hedgehog bites on cows’ teats. In New Zealand, hedgehogs get blamed for damage to young plants and for attacks on the eggs of ground-nesting birds. Biologists here, as elsewhere, have made estimates of hedgehog numbers and

their distribution by counting the bodies squashed on highways, a reminder that the hedgehog is another frequent victim of mechanical “progress.” For centuries, gypsies have roasted hedgehogs in Europe. Last month the chef of the Ritz Hotel in London, Mr Jacques-Marcel Viney, recalled on his retirement that he had cooked hedgehogs and rats during World War II when he was a prisoner at Buchenwald. This, of course, was not evidence that he was disapproving of their existence. Hedgehogs deserve a better reputation. One might wonder that no protest group has made .the hedgehog their 1 symbol. The creatures are masters of adapting to a policy of passive resistance. They cannot be aggressive if they try; they repel, in splendid, spiney fashion, the aggression of others. ' A word is finally being said for hedgehogs. “The/Times/’ in London, in; what may be one of its last issues, reports . that a British Hedgehog Preservation Society has been launched by Major Adrian Coles. The society has one achievement to its credit already: it has persuaded the Shropshire County Council to fit hedgehog ramps to cattle grids. There is a cause that might well be taken up in New Zealand. Passive, prickly, not very attractive — and' with an undeserved reputation for being something of a nuisance — hedgehogs make up an under-privileged minority in suburban gardens and along country roads. Why not offer them a word of encouragement, a saucer, of milk, even a bridge or two on cattle stops? Our hedgehogs are surely as worthy of protection as the relatives they left behind, a century ago, in the “old country”.