The hedgehog  

 

I had never before seen a hedgehog in our garden, but on Saturday afternoon we saw a little hedgehog in the centre of our lawn. He wasn’t running about and seemed to be very wobbly on his legs. We decided to go to see our visitor up close and very slowly we crept closer towards him. To my surprise the hedgehog stayed where it was. From time to time he did move about, but he looked slightly drunk. Heather put a saucer of milk down for him and he drank the lot. We consulted the internet and we found loads of sites dealing with hedgehogs. It seems that at this time hedgehogs have started to hibernate and so it is not a good sign to find one in broad daylight in the garden. What to do? Obviously telephone the hedgehog hotline. Yes honestly. Which is how we found an animal refuge at Kings Norton. I persuaded our new friend to get into a cardboard box using some old towels to form a little nest. Then Heather drove her Alfa-Romeo with blue light flashing and arrived at the refuge just before it closed for the day. With sadness, but also some relief Heather transferred responsibility for Hector or possibly Harriet to others with greater knowledge than us of how to look after animals in distress. Before Heather left, the person in charge invited her to telephone for an update on our little friend’s well-being during the following week.

Naturally, the refuge produces its own news-letter. The animals are its stars and in the latest edition we read the stories of the previous mistreatment of the cats, dogs and even a goat which are its guests. In fact, there was an obituary for the goat which had just died. Her photograph was on the front page and, inside, we read of her character and her particularly happy relationship with one of the workers at the refuge. From her new home we also have a letter from a cat which had been in the refuge. She has sent a photo and we read that she is very happy. She says “My Mumsy has started to let me out, but I don’t like going too far”. But why are we like this? Why do we endow animals with a human character? We want them to be our friends in the human sense and appreciate us not just for the food that we give them. I say animals, but I doubt that we would think of a slug in the same way. And certainly a hedgehog would see it only as lunch. We have our favourites: those who are cuddly and unthreatening like cats and dogs, deer or zebras or those which are menacing but impressive like a lion but whom we see only at a distance via the tele. It’s only when the TV shows us a lion killing a zebra that we see the clash between the artificial world we have constructed and the real world. We realize that cats live in our houses for the food and the warmth and not because they want human friends in any sense we would understand. We see that in reality nature is not huggable, but selfish and dangerous.

But this doesn’t mean that we ought or that we can ignore the links which we have with the rest of nature. We are blessed or perhaps cursed with an empathy for other human beings. This empathy is not however uniform: we prefer our relatives to our friends and our friends to strangers. But when a stranger becomes someone whom we know as an individual, and no longer just a member of a group, the empathy which we feel for him becomes stronger. And I imagine that it’s the same thing with animals. For hedgehogs in general I have never had any particular feeling of empathy. But for the hedgehog which appeared in our garden, our empathy grew as we got closer to it. Having invested quite a lot of time and effort in trying to safeguard it, it became an individual whom we took to our hearts. To decide to ignore such a feeling would mean not just failing to take care of an animal in its hour of need, but also losing a little of what it means to be a human being - in the best sense.

And there’s something-else. Traditionally we have seen a great distinction between humans and animals. Supposedly, we have a soul and they don’t. We are capable of doing things which require considerabe intellectual ability. Animals can’t. But particularly for those who don’t believe in the existence of a soul, we see more and more that we are part of a continuum in our world. In fact, of course, other animals have an intellectual capacity. The crow, with its bird brain, can make tools when required to help it to get at its food. There are animals which have a strong feeling of fairness and which will mourn the death of a friend. We see chimpanzees with the ability to mime when they want to communicate with the stupid humans who cannot understand chimp-speak. And who knows what happens in the minds of whales and dolphins? So then our view of the animal kingdom needs to be adapted to the facts which are increasingly emerging. This doesn’t mean that I intend to become a vegetarian any time soon or join the hedgehogs in eating slugs. But a wish to eat food which comes from a system which is more caring of animals seems to me to be reasonable.

There is a postscript to the story of our hedgehog. It seems that he was a male and very ill. Unfortunately, he died on Monday. I suppose then that this essay is our little hedgehog’s epitaph. And so:

R.I.P. Hector
 

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