How to save the hedgehog

Here’s a strange truth about British life: we love a hedgehog. Britain is conspicuously short of an anti-hedgehog lobby. No one runs down a hedgehog with malice. None of us can see a hedgehog crêpe without a twinge of regret. It takes an unfeasibly tough human to look at a hedgehog — even a photograph — without an unbidden softening of the heart.

So if wishes were hedgehogs, our country would be an erinacean paradise. Why, then, have we lost a third of our hedgehogs over the last decade? The British Trust for Ornithology — they’re experts on censusing and go beyond their original remit — cites estimates of 30 million hedgehogs in Britain in the 1950s. This fell to 1.5 million in the 1990s and now stands at fewer than a million.

The problem is not roadkill. Mr Toad and his poop-poop machines take a relatively small responsibility for the decline in British hedgehogs.