Making Friends With The Hedgehogs

Sam & Papa-Hog

Whilst we were living in Italy, Sam (our doberman) discovered that a family of hedgehogs had taken up residence in and around the grapevines in the backgarden.  Two or three nights a week, he would catch a different member of the hedgehog clan and parade triumphantly through the garden with the spikey ball in his mouth before depositing the said hog, slightly dazed yet unscathed in a different part of the garden.  Obviously it must have been a traumatic and tiring experience for the hedgehogs but they could at least recover from the evening's escapades with a daytime snooze.  That was until Sam found out where they slept... 

Following the bed-hog-room discovery, Sam made a point of personally inviting/forcefully bringing them to his house during the day as well as the usual evening parades.  Needless to say the hogs were quite disgruntled by this unwanted neighbourly attention and shortly after a lunchtime invite, papa-hog being dropped onto the kitchen table, the hedgehog family moved into the garden next door where fending off the neighbours' cats seemed like a much more appealing proposition.

More of Sam at Twelve Hairy Legs