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Double negative? Not Really!
Monday mornings are bad enough. Add into the mix that it’s a school holiday and my family is still home nicely tucked up in a warm bed, then the idea of cleaning out cages is not a strong reason to get me out of bed.
Except inside these cages are the sweetest little baby hedgehogs I’m about to meet!
In the Common Room
Hold your horses! There were soft, gentle animal discussions going on in the common room before we started. (Even gentler than usual because some of the interns were on holiday).
First the Human Angle
A box of chocolates waited for us on the table! 🙂 It was left by a grateful finder who had arranged for a sick hedgehog to be brought into the rescue centre and received him back into their garden when it was healthy.
Lung Worms
The vet told us she treated the hedgehog for lung worms. I recently interviewed a pet shop owner for an upcoming animal ambulance magazine article because she’s had a couple of hedgehogs come to her that needed rescuing. The first one also had lung worms, so I wondered whether it’s a common disease amongst hedgehogs.
The vet confirmed that it is, and surprisingly, also with cats (if they’re not regularly treated for worms). Worms in your lungs!! It sounds dreadful! Thankfully I treated my own cat as soon as we let her outide, though I did make a point to see when the 3 month treatment needs renewal. I was also pleased to learn that lung worms aren’t contagious so there’s no danger of bringing lung worms home from hedgehogs and passing them on to my cat!
Animal Forms
Someone also asked whether there were still incoming problems with the “animal forms”. These are the forms that accompany animals that are brought in, and provide details of the find location so that the rescue centre staff know where to release the animals back into their own environment. They also have a space for a brief description of the condition / situation with the animal. Indeed, an email has been circulated within the animal ambulance reminding us to be sure to complete the animal forms correctly.
I asked about it, and was given an example where a form said that a bird had a broken wing. But when the staff opened the rescue box, the bird flew out! The form had either been filled-in incorrectly, or been mixed up with another bird who’d broken his foot. If the admin would have been correct, then the staff would have taken steps (ahem…unlike the bird) to ensure he couldn’t escape and fly around a sterile work environment.
Division of Labour
After a semi-miserable time in the washing room at the end of my last shift, I was very happy to be placed with the hedgehogs again! 🙂 I learned that officially I wasn’t in the hedgehog room, but working with the mammals – who happened to all be hedgehogs! 😉 This means maybe I’ll be seeing more kinds of animals in the future!
At first I thought I’d be on my own because I was the only volunteer present – the other 3 present were 2 die-hard interns working through their holiday (so they generally trail the vet) and the guy who prepares the food for the animals. I raised a slight concern that I can’t distinguish (unhealthy) green crap from regular crap thanks to my colourblindness, but was told this wasn’t a big problem.
I was pleased that I wasn’t limited!
Anyway, it turned out I worked with an intern training to be a veterinary assistant, so we could have a nice chat as we looked after the hedgehogs (and other non-existent mammals! 😉 ).
Baby Hedeghogs
We finished quickly so the “head animal carer” asked us to look after the baby hedgehogs in intensive care.
Well I suppose not quite babies because these were old enough to feed themselves, but they were small and about as cuddly as you can get a hedgehog to be! I guess most were around 10 cm long, and their spikes didn’t seem as rigid as their older counter-parts in the room next door. Maybe they just seemed softer because they were shorter.
Their undersides were not only soft, but covered in fur which splayed out to the sides which made them look like an awkward ball of spikes and soft fur with a snuffly snout wobbling from side to side!
Looking after them is – as you’d expect – much the same as with the older hedgehogs, but a bit more hard-core. Hedgehogs are stress sensitive at the best of times; being sick or injured even more so. And so too is being a baby. Noise is minimised as much as possible in this room, although the background hum of the warmed incubators seems to contradict this. Perhaps the white noise helps.
Handling
Handling them is also minimised, though in practice it was difficult not to pick them up because they tended to move out of their sleeping bags (which I’d normally use to pick them up) and once out they’d move around in the cage a lot. With this combo, I nearly made a terrible mistake…
A baby hedgehog had left his sleeping bag so I held him against my chest as I cleaned his cage. I threw the dirty towel that lined it into a box, and grabbed hold of the discarded sleeping bag to do the same. It must have been really dirty inside because it was a lot heavier than I expected. And then it moved! It was a difficult maneuver with a fragile hedgehog in one hand, but I managed to look inside the sleeping bag. I was surprised and delighted to see 2 other baby hedgehogs in there!!!
Until now I had no idea there were more hedgehogs per cage than 1…and I nearly threw 2 of these sweet little creatures away!!
On account of their fragility, I needed to give each baby a good check to make sure they were doing OK in recovery. Indeed, my work partner found an adult hedgehog had died overnight in the room next door just moments ago, so we were both particular careful to check here where the chance of mortality, sadly, is higher.
Checking them carefully seemed to be in competition with the minimising stress for fragile animals ethos we wanted to adhere to. But it was because these baby hedgehog are fragile animals, we needed to check them…
The hedgehogs in the incubators were particularly difficult to deal with. Obviously these were the most fragile, but accessing them wasn’t through a cage-wide door, but through a tiny plastic flap maybe 15 cm square. In other words, I could use only one hand inside these incubators. A few others had 2 sliding doors, but sliding each door to the centre so I could use both my hands meant I could use 2 hands to gently pick up a hedgehog, but I wasn’t able to move him!
Feeding
Of course the patients need feeding, and each cage receives a bowl of water and a bowl of food. Seeing up to 3 tiny hedgehogs around a feeding bowl with their paws on the side and their snouts wobbling around would made any icy heart melt!
Some cages had hedgehogs with special dietary needs, so it was a simple case of matching up the number marked on the feeding bowl with the number of the cage.
Not so simple – I’d been looking at the number printed closest (underneath) the cage, when in fact I should have been looking at the number above the cage. Thankfully I realised after only 2 cages, so it was easy to correct – and thankfully none of the hedgehogs had started eating the wrong food…
Final Thoughts
All in all, this was a really cool shift! I feel I’m getting to know the place and people better, just as much as I am the hedgehogs!
