Mowers, pesticides, rapid urbanization and motor vehicles are DECIMATING little hedgehogs in England!

Sweet little hedgehogs, one of Britain’s most treasured animals, are in serious trouble. The hedgehog population has crashed from over 30 million to just one million and they are dying in droves.

We are working to save them.

Farm and garden mowers, rapid urbanization and motor vehicles are deadly to these vulnerable little creatures. More than 100,000 hedgehogs are killed on Britain's roads every year – that’s more than any other mammal. Towns and backyards are death traps for hedgehogs - they are often mutilated by mower blades, entangled in garbage and plastic, drowned in uncovered drains, or squashed on busy roads. They are disappearing even more rapidly in the countryside, as hedgerows and field margins are lost to intensive farming.

Thousands of hedgehogs are maimed or killed every day. We must save them! We will, with your help.

Winter is nigh and baby hedgehogs are at their most vulnerable.

Right now, tiny helpless hedgehog babies are coming into a world where they will immediately face death. Deadly pesticides used by these farmers kill the hedgehog’s natural diet of insects and worms. Worse, many hedgehogs ingest poisons themselves and suffer a cruel, slow death.

Newborn hedgehogs face so many dangers; in the short time it took us to make the video that accompanies this newsletter, we discovered:

• a mother and her babies who were made homeless when a gardener demolished his shed,
• a lonely baby fighting for survival after a woman found the tiny creature’s mother squashed on a road, and
• a nest of babies exposed after undergrowth was hacked away from a fence - all but one of the babies was pecked to death by crows.

Together with the Harper Asprey Wildlife Rescue (HAWR) in Surrey, we are working to save the survivors. This is really important because the hedgehogs are female and, if they survive the next five weeks of intensive care, they may be able to breed and be returned to nature.

We need to raise £3,000.00 ($3,900.00) to buy an urgently needed incubator to save these babies!

HAWR rescues around 1,400 hedgehogs each year with the aim of returning them all to the woods where they belong. We have promised to ask our supporters to help. HAWR has 120 hedgehogs (not including other wildlife) who need daily care while being nursed back to health.

Incubators are crucial to give the very sick and orphaned young a hope of returning to the wild. As soon as they are healthy and released, new ones arrive.

Any amount you can donate today will go a long way to getting these rescued hedgehogs back on their feet. Please donate generously so we can help save this special species.

For the animals,

Brian and Gloria Davies (and Max and Flora!)
Founders Network for Animals

P.S. Saving hedgehog lives does not come cheap; the first and most urgent need is for an incubator which is vital for the survival of orphaned babies, but HAWR also desperately needs an X-ray machine to capture images of the bones and internal organs of injured hedgehogs, a refrigerated medicine cabinet to store antibiotics, and vet crates and cages to house these sweet creatures while they recover. We’re hoping you can help!

P.P.S. We need to act fast. Join us in the fight to save this national treasure. Voted Britain’s favorite mammal AND voted as Britain’s national species, hedgehogs will be sorely missed if we fail them.