This Scottish Couple Runs a Hedgehog Hospital From Home!
567 have been rehabilitated at their Burntisland Hedgehog Haven.
Sharon and Andy Longhurst care so deeply about hedgehogs, that they have transformed their home in Fife, Scotland into a hedgehog hospital that has saved hundreds of these cute yet endangered mini-mammals.
Their compassionate work involves helping their charges recuperate after they are found ill or injured, with the goal of returning them back into the wild, as BBC News reports.
From Occasional Help to Fully-Fledged Rescue Facility
Sharon Longhurst explains that their hedgehog rescue adventure started when they came across an ailing hedgehog on a roadside during a trip to Kirkcaldy, which saw them driving a 50-mile round trip to the nearest wildlife hospital. They repeated the trip two weeks later when they stumbled upon another stricken hedgehog.
They soon realized that others would not make such a long trip to help save hedgehogs. They reached out to a longtime hedgehog rehabilitator in St. Andrews who was about to retire. He mentored them, and also passed on a lot of his equipment.
This remarkable couple has three children and each work in public transportation, but once they started helping these endearing nocturnal creatures, they felt a sense of responsibility towards them.
Today, they run a sophisticated hedgehog care facility in the grounds of their home, supported by local donations. There’s a maternity ward in their garden, and an “ intensive care unit” in their garage Their rescue center has seven ICU units, 40 cages, and a 24-strong team of volunteers to help clean cages, and weighing and checking on the animals on a daily basis , as the Daily Record details. They can also call upon a growing network of local drivers, aka the “hogbulance.” These drivers respond at all hours to calls to transport hedgehogs.
Nothing is too much trouble for this dedicated pair. They have been known to stay up through the night to feed orphan hoglets, and have treated 567 hedgehogs and counting since they established the Burntisland Hedgehog Haven three years ago.
Their website explains that the mission of the hedgehog haven is caring for sick, orphaned and injured hedgehogs until they are ready to be released back into the wild. More broadly, they aim to inspire a culture of compassion and empathy towards animals.
While not veterinarians, both are fully trained in hedgehog care and in giving them first aid, and hold a licence to care for 40 animals. These come to them tangled in football nets, covered in fly larvae, hurt by gardening tools or because they fell down a drain, bitten by dogs, with pesticide burns or with disease.
As Sharon Longhurst tells the BBC: “If there's a hedgehog out there that needs help and it's in pain, I can't say no, we have to help it… . We will do all we can for a hedgehog, if it needs X-rays, investigations done we will try and do all we can to get that hedgehog healthy and back out in the wild.”
This compassion sees people regularly turning up at their home with hedgehogs that need their care. Andy Longhurst adds that if they don’t help the hedgehog, it will just die. “We love hedgehogs so much and there isn't enough help out there,” his wife chimes in.
“They’re such characters,” Sharon Longhurst said. “You get the cheeky ones; you get the ones that are quite placid, and you get the ones that are really huffy and they ball up. Each one has got its own personality, and they are funny creatures.”
While the pair are proficient in hedgehog rehabilitation, they know when to ask for more expert medical help: “Anything bigger than a 50 pence piece wound-wise would go straight to the vet and antibiotics are always issued by the vet on an individual case basis,” Sharon Longhurst shares with the BBC.
“Never in a million years did we expect to do this,” Andy Longhurst tells The Washington Post.
Europe’s Hedgehogs Remain Threatened
Western European hedgehogs native to Britain, make their homes in gardens and wooden areas, but they are in significant decline due to multiple threats.
These include habitat loss and fragmentation due to urban development and intensive farming that breaks up hedges and natural spaces.
In addition, the use of pesticides reduces their insect food, largely beetles, worms and slugs that they feed on, leading to starvation. Increased traffic is leading to more road death, while garden dangers like lawnmowers and bonfires pose significant risks. Sharon Longhurst also notes that local hedgehogs are hibernating less because climate change means they are not getting the constant low temperature they need.
This decline, one of over 30 percent in recent years, has led to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) updating the status of the West European hedgehog to “near threatened” on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species in 2024, with experts calling for immediate conservation in backyards and natural settings.
Significantly, Sharon and Andy Longhurst’s mission, as spelt out on their website, extends to the broader goal of educating the public on how to create a safe space for hedgehogs in their own gardens.
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