THESE tiny baby hedgehogs were orphaned after a horrifying accident crushed their mother and left a sibling with agonising fatal injuries.
The surviving pair, who are only a few days old, have been taken in by Poole’s CRASH Hedgehog Hospital, where founder Angela Squires is giving them round-the-clock feeds. She said the family was hurt when a couple decided to move their garden shed.
“Instead of dismantling it where they could see and check underneath for nesting hedgehogs, they just moved it complete,” she explained.
“The whole shed was pulled along and inevitably dropped on the nursing mother and the hoglets below. Mum was squashed and died and the three babies were injured and traumatised.
“The smallest had internal injuries and was screaming constantly. He died that night. The other two have bruising, but I managed to get some milk into them and hopefully they should pull through.”
Angela, who devotes her life to rescuing hedgehogs, pleaded with people not to disturb sheds in the spring and summer, which is when the hoglets are born. “I can’t get the thought out of my mind of the poor mum getting slowly crushed as she got dragged along,” she said.
She has also been campaigning for gardeners to stop using slug pellets containing metaldehyde because of the number of hedgehogs that have been dying after eating poisoned slugs or snails.
