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A French woman created a hedgehog rescue centre at her home near Paris, where she has treated more than a 1,000 hedgehogs in eight years.
It started in 2018 when Sara Stahl and her husband found two motherless baby hedgehogs in their garden in Orsay, a picturesque village in the Chevreuse valley near Paris.
Stahl realised there was only one rescue centre for wild animals in the whole region of Paris and she decided to step in and created ‘Les P’tits Kipik’ which translates to “the little ones that spike”, a rescue centre in the garden of her house.
She created several enclosures and a care-providing centre with two machines for assisted breathing and scales for weighing them. She cleans their enclosures and provides them with food every day.
Humans are responsible for 91% of hedgehog deaths
Humans are the biggest danger to hedgehogs, responsible of 91 per cent of their deaths. Only 9 per cent are due to their natural predators: the badger, the great horned owl or the brown bear.
There are many ways that people can help the hedgehog populations, for example people with fences around their gardens should make a little hole to let them through so they don’t end up on roads.
One of the more recent problems was the robot lawn mowers that people operate during night time, when hedgehogs are active, and of course the increasing use of pesticides.
By the end of 2024, the Western European Hedgehog has moved from ‘Least Concern’ to ‘Near Threatened’ on the IUCN Red List
Video editor • Denis Loctier