IN Philip Larkin’s poem The Mower, in which a hedgehog is fatally caught in the machine’s blades, the poet writes of his shock and remorse. ‘I had seen it before, and even fed it, once. Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world unmendably.’
Larkin captures the essence of our relationship with hedgehogs. They exist, innocent and prehistoric, on the fringes of our world, between gardens and open country; and our contact with them is often clumsy harm—the census of hedgehogs is based on roadkill. Yet they are consistently voted the nation’s favourite mammal and are embedded in children’s literature. These days, few youngsters will see hedgehogs, as their numbers plummet. Our relationship with them is really a question of our responsibility towards the natural world. The demise of the creatures is a sign that we are out of sync with Nature.
A friend of mine, a television executive, described stoning a rat outside his back door at dusk only to realise too late
