Who are you calling prickly?

Hedgehogs live on the fringes of our world, adored, yet often unwittingly harmed. Spurred by her own encounter with Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, Sarah Sands explores what they tell us about our relationship with Nature and life

- Sarah Sands

IN Philip Larkin's poem The Mower, in which a hedgehog is fatally caught in the machine's blades, the poet writes of his shock and remorse. 'I had seen it before, and even fed it, once. Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world unmendably.'

Larkin captures the essence of our relationship with hedgehogs. They exist, innocent and prehistoric, on the fringes of our world, between gardens and open country; and our contact with them is often clumsy harmthe census of hedgehogs is based on roadkill. Yet they are consistently voted the nation's favourite mammal and are embedded in children's literature. These days, few youngsters will see hedgehogs, as their numbers plummet. Our relationship with them is really a question of our responsibility towards the natural world. The demise of the creatures is a sign that we are out of sync with Nature.

A friend of mine, a television executive, described stoning a rat outside his back door at dusk only to realise too late that it was a hedgehog. He said he felt sick, and perhaps cursed, as if he had struck a unicorn. It was unbearably poignant.

I was immediately reminded of the poet Ted Hughes bringing a hedgehog inside, only to see it snuffling, as if wet with tears. 'I could have kissed him for compassion,' he wrote. Somehow, taking the hedgehog from its outside world into ours had made it wretched.