Hedgehog A&E

From Tony Thain:

We have often been asked exactly what we do with hedgehogs that are admitted to our first aid unit. Hopefully this will give an insight to some of the work that Tonia carries out to return our prickly patients to full health and release back to their environment.

In the last episode sent to The Diary I mentioned that a hedgehog had sought out Tonia during her evening rounds, and that it had a nasty wound possibly caused by a garden implement or by being caught up in abandoned rylock or barbed wire. The wound is now almost healed but there is still work to do each day to clean it out with saline and coat it with Manuka Honey, as well as massaging with Aloe Vera cream to stimulate regrowth of damaged and lost spines.

Once "Samantha" as she is called, has had her appointment, it is time for "Tigger" to have a full on physio session. Tigger is the son of Trina and he managed to hurt himself somewhere in the garden; also, by biting Tonia he was dropped a couple of inches onto carpet; and at the last report had just returned from a visit to the Vets in Fort William. The Vet had made it quite clear that there was nothing that she could do, "As hedgehogs are difficult to deal with: they keep rolling up!"  Well, here are some pictures of a "rolled up" hedgehog!

The first thing that Tigger has to face is the "Hydro-Therapy pool". Here he is encouraged to use all four legs and although all hedgehogs can swim, Tonia keeps a steadying hand under the animal for support so as not to stress him out too much. I think that Tigger enjoys his swim in warm water as he is not too keen to come out.

Next there is warm air from Tonia's hair dryer to dry off all the thick fur on his underside.  This relaxes Tigger and he often just lies there with his feet in the air until he is dry.

In order to keep the back muscle supple Tigger has the ubiquitous Aloe Vera massaged into his back, followed by a gentle massage of his front legs.

Finally, to get some more exercise Tigger plays "Murder Ball".  We roll the ball to him and he grabs it and "Murders" it! This gives him a lot of exercise to all legs and he tends to forget about his poorly legs. Slowly he is improving, but I think that he may overwinter with us so that he is fully fit for the Spring. We have been speaking to Tiggywinkles about the situation and they do the same sort of physio on some of their animals, but they have advised that muscular injuries take a long time to heal.

As if Tonia doesn't have enough on her plate with these two, another hedgehog arrived at 6.00pm and obviously wanted to book into the hospital. This one appears to have a bad case of worms as she is slowly starving and is a bigger and older animal than we first thought.

In the meantime Trina's two daughters have been released, but the weather changed severely overnight and they decided to stay. Soon we are going to have another go at releasing them, when the weather stabilises.

Many thanks to Tony Thain for story and pictures.