Naughty Pets Corner

Having had the hedgehog for over six months, we thought we have experienced all the varieties of naughtiness he was capable of, but (as we always find when we think an animal has been as naughty as it can) we were wrong. We were due to go down to Brighton for the weekend to see our scarily responsible doctor friends and as usual, the getting up and getting going stage of the day was taking a bit longer than expected. So while the Boy Wonder was in the shower I went down to clean out the hedgehog so he would smell as fragrant as possible on our return - I took out the heating pad, towel and bowl to wash and it was only once they were out that I realised that there was a suspiciously small array of places where he could still be. After a little frantic scrabbling through poo covered newspaper and some curious thoughts about how a hedgehog could accidentally shrink down to a size which could still be sheltering in the box, I was sure he was officially missing. I shouted up to the Boy Wonder who was a little confused as to why I was shrieking up the stairs and went back to being frantic around the kitchen, searching under the gas fire, down the side of the dishwasher and contemplating whether he could have got into the pan cupboard and down the gap between the kitchen and the cellar. I searched under the sofas and looked into every crack and crevice that could house a spiky little escapologist. I even considered the chance that he may have been stolen, imagining some vigilante looking through the window, misunderstanding the situation and 'liberating' him. Fortunately the Boy Wonder came down and, with his usual calm, collected approach to things, started rooting around under the furniture with the broom handle. A few seconds later he started laughing as his poking revealed that Hoggle was curled up inside an old slipper of his which has been under the dresser for at least a couple of years. Somehow he had managed to get out of his box (didn't know that was an option - he'd never done it before!) and make the heroic two meter journey to under the dresser where he clearly felt some synergy with the Boy Wonder's stinky slipper and decided to make it into a sleeping bag. I was worried that he was trapped due to the direction of his spines, but after I spent a careful five minutes cutting the back of the slipper open and peeling him out, he spent the following five minutes snuggling himself back in there like a big grey banana. This little routine meant that not only did we have the best excuse for being late ever ('Sorry we're going to be late - the hedgehog's escaped'), but also the fun of clearing everything off the dresser which was almost entirely offset by the cutest pictures even taken of a really dusty floor.

Living with a hedgehog

The first thing to know about living with a hedgehog is that they smell. It's not the first thing I found out about living with a hedgehog, because I have little to no sense of smell for periods of time and don't really notice that it's gone again until someone says 'What's that smell' and I have to either admit that I can't smell it (which usually results in them asking me questions about not being able to smell that I don't know the answers to), or I have to guess a smell from the look on their face and pretend that I can smell it too, which can go drastically wrong.
 However, the Boy Wonder reliably informs me that our hedgehog smells, which is unsurprising given that he is used to outdoor life in the country where pretty much everything smells, and anyway there's enough air to make smells go away quite quickly unless it's a really big area of poo in a field. I didn't really realise how much the country smells until I moved to some country, and bearing in mind that I can only smell, at a guess, two thirds of the smells available to me, it must really smell to everyone else. On the plus side, we do live near a tannery which is another surprisingly smelly business and having limited olfactory ability is definitely a blessing when it comes to the once or twice a month when they do whatever they do that smells so bad.
Another useful thing to know about living with a hedgehog is that they eat REALLY loudly. Not just quite loudly like you might think when someone says a small creature eats really loudly, but seriously loudly, to the point where you can hear our hedgehog eating in a box downstairs from our bedroom upstairs - not a huge distance, but certainly further than you would expect to hear a hedgehog eating over. (Or, to be more pedantic, a distance over which you would not expect to hear a hedgehog eating.) There are a few other interesting things about living with a hedgehog to do with an apparent fondness for burrowing into towels, a cheeky way of pretending to be on the verge of death one minute by breathing all oddly and then getting up, running about and eating some food the next minute just to keep you on your toes.
 Another hedgehog fact, further to a conversation with our local hedgehog hospital, is that our hedgehog now has pets of his own. I bought him wax worms, which are little caterpillar kind of things which will turn into wax moths if left for too long. Hopefully our hog will eat them all before it comes to that as the Boy Wonder hates moths and being as he is the one who is enduring most of the smells, it seems a bit unfair to inflict a live moth farm on him too.
 To his immense credit, the Boy Wonder is really very understanding and even came with me to take the Hog to the vet yesterday - he makes some pretty weird noises and because he spends most of the time hiding, sleeping and waiting until we go to bed before getting up and stampeding around his box it's hard to tell whether the noises are symptoms of some kind of illness or just normal noises for a hedgehog to make. Our vet is a very nice man - I took Mogbad, our stolen cat to him, and even when he fell out of the scales and weed on the table, nice French vet man was overwhelmed by his attempts to get attention and joined me in wondering how anyone could abandon him (more on Mogbad at some point). So I wasn't entirely surprised when nice French vet man was very nice to Hoggle, describing him as 'very sweet' and giving me props for taking him on.
However, nothing quite prepared me for the sight of nice French vet man trying to listen to Hoggle's chest through a stethoscope pressed to his spines - it looks about as ridiculous as you would imagine such an endeavour would look, and I was very glad to be there to witness it, particularly when the lovely vet turned to me and said 'I cannot really 'ear anything' with an admirably Gallic shrug.   As it turns out, so long as he is eating, defecating (medical terminology for the vast and unholy deposits he seems determined to leave in his water bowl) and curling up when poked, that's about all the signs you can hope for from a healthy hedgehog and I am now reassured about his health, meaning that I won't have to mute the TV every 10 minutes to attempt to engage the Boy Wonder in yet another thrilling game of "cough, sneeze or grunt".
 All in all, whilst it is quite fun to have a hedgehog in the house, don't let the fact that they seem to do all right in the wild fool you - as soon as they know you care, they need a constant temperature of 20 degrees, insects and live worms to eat to keep their teeth healthy, a never-ending supply of places to poo and people who don't mind waking up at 5 in the morning whispering 'was that a burglar or the hedgehog?'. Oh, and you have to keep them until after the last frost of the spring, so he's living with us till April now.