Hedgehogs are declining rapidly across Europe due to habitat loss, road mortality, and garden management practices. Understanding their welfare needs helps urban residents become effective allies for hedgehog survival.
Hedgehog welfare in urban environments reflects the broader challenge of making human-dominated landscapes hospitable to wildlife species that evolved in more connected, less managed habitats. Individual hedgehog welfare challenges include garden-fragmentation starvation, road strike injury and death, poisoning from pesticides, and hazards from garden equipment including strimmers and bonfires. At the population level, habitat connectivity is the dominant welfare and conservation concern: hedgehogs need to move between multiple garden territories to find sufficient invertebrate prey, mates, and nesting sites. The proliferation of solid garden fencing that prevents this movement has created a landscape of isolated garden islands that hedgehogs cannot traverse effectively. The hedgehog highway movement — encouraging neighbors to create small gaps in shared fences — demonstrates how collective community action can restore connectivity at a neighborhood scale. Individual garden management choices including reducing pesticide use, maintaining wild corners with leaf litter, and providing supplementary water in drought conditions directly improve the welfare of hedgehogs that rely on individual gardens.