You might not know from reading this blog that much of my personal reading is about animals. Most recently I’ve enjoyed “The Hedgehog Dilemma: A Tale of Obsession, Nostalgia, and the World’s most Charming Mammal.” The author, Hugh Warwick, is also quite charming. Like many of my favorite books (for instance, Tim’s “The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping”) came from Daedalus remainders: www.salebooks.com. Whoever is the buyer has good taste.
A hedgehog is not just a mini-porcupine. Though they have variations of temperament, they are little more than clockwork in some ways. A sort of pokemon. snuffling around nocturnally in the debris of gardens, thinking of food and sleeping in an improvised bed. Its armament is more “prickles” than quills, but formidable enough that a person would be well-advised to wear gloves.
Like most of the best books about animals, the little specific beastie leads to speculations about the whole array of habitats and their ecological connections, including the emotional ties to human beings. The conflict is always between the scientists trying to understand what really happens versus the constant streams of fantasy, both positive and negative -- with the worst results often arising from the positive taken to extremes. Not just “loving to death” but also weird practices like fans quaffing worm shooters (vodka garnished with the larva that hedgehogs look for).
On the scientific side, Warwick “radio-tagged” a dozen hedgehogs with the embellishment of little green lights, and then tracked them night after night to see where they went. With a small spring scale, he weighed each specimen when it was relocated as a check on their health. The goal was to see whether the little juveniles could survive since they had been in care all winter because of abandonment by their mothers or maybe damage to them that caused citizens to bring them for care. It turned out that the majority in the study were lost, but not due to any fault or lack in themselves. Many were run over by cars or their natural predator, badgers, left only the empty and prickly skins in a little smudge of hedgehog blood.
At first Warwick tried to identify the adventurers by their radio frequencies, but their tendencies to variation soon became names. The animals around here most frequently radio-tagged and followed are grizzly bears, which also will acquire names. Even if conventional names are resisted, their tag numbers become names in the same way as .007. It’s hard to imagine mistaking a hedgehog for Bond, James Bond. Most people associate the species with Beatrix Potter’s “Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle,” a benignly aproned little character. Of course, Potter was more or less forced into anthropomorphism because she was excluded from proper biology writing, though she was highly qualified -- merely female.
At one point English hedgehogs were accused of being egg-suckers and there was a campaign to kill them in order to save birds. At another they became the object of obsessive pet-lovers who would pay enormous sums for them, even though they were hardly nice to pet. The craze encouraged quick breeding -- that’s IN-breeding -- that sowed a mutation causing the animals to develop the staggers and die tormented. The usual human distortion, already so common in dogs and race horses.
Warwick concludes in the end that hedgehogs are in part so addictive BECAUSE they have so little personality that they don’t attach -- they are perfect for projection of fondness and ownership precisely because it’s all in the heart of the beholder. No counter assertions or demands from the pet. Check out this encounter: www.youtube.com/watch?v=D36JUfE1oYk A spooked but curious kitten is seeing what’s in her own mind -- a big spiky mouse, maybe. The little beast, unafraid, is in an improvised “bathtub” because hedgehogs stink and they often have fleas. They spend their lives bumbling around in what amounts to compost and they eat slugs, so why would anyone be surprised?
When really grumpy, hedgehogs make grumbling hissing objections and give a reflexive little leap. Warwick said he had one little critter he especially prized because when kindergarten classes came around and each child had a chance to hold it, it dependably sneezed, sputtered and leapt in the hands of each one. Seems like it would be easy to design a little toy that would do that. But it wouldn’t be biological, which is part of the charm.
This book is in three parts. One is about hedgehog research, both the figuring out of what they do, where they go, and whether indeed they suck eggs -- and on the other hand how humans react to them. The middle part investigates some of the more marginal human fandom, which dresses up like hedgehogs, eats worms, races them against each other and -- well, I suppose intimacy with a prickly beast is finally limited. One can hardly have sex with a hedgehog though some people have speculated about it. A black lab that joined Warwick on his nightly hedgehog canvass, deploying his nose radar with more efficiency that Warwick’s radio transmission antenna, ended up being left at home because his tender mouth was bleeding in spite of carrying the spiked and rolled up hedgehogs very gently. But there IS a porn star named “The Hedgehog.” You can google him. He’s a high-personality character.
Hugh gives us an honest account of his rather narcissistic attempt to find a “Hugh’s Hedgehog” which lives in China. He had seen a “study skin” in a museum collection but hoped to find a living one in situ. It was an adventure with many risky moments, small confusions and hardships, just as all good travel literature ought to be, but in the end he succeeded -- in a manner of speaking. It seems that hedgehogs are good to eat and Hugh rescued “Dora,” a little creature at the food market, and set her free. She WAS Hugh’s for a short time. He also managed to locate and hold the very first collected study skin of Hugh’s Hedgehog. AND he had lunch with a rock group called “Hedgehog” and acquired one of their CD’s called “Noise Hit World.” It’s from the category called “NoisePoP.” The musicians claimed that they named themselves Hedgehog because in China it is considered a very spiritual animal. Also, they identified with the independence and prickliness.
The third section is more philosophical about the uses of a hedgehog as a charismatic mini-mammal to educate people, calling them to action on behalf of the webs of life around the world. Warwick speaks of “Bubblegum love,” which is his term for sentimentality, “blindness to what is real.” He speaks of the need to know the wild without destroying it with our relentless ideas about owning, cuddling, commercializing and corrupting every aspect into something toy-like. We must learn to respect the lives and self-determined goals of a little beast whuffling around in the hedges, looking for slugs to eat and then to digest whilst curled up in a mash of dry leaves. NOT wearing an apron.
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