Hedgehogs have declined significantly across European countries and urban garden management practices can either support or harm individual hedgehog welfare significantly.
Hedgehog welfare in urban areas depends more on the cumulative quality of garden management across entire neighborhoods than on any single garden. A hedgehog needs connected habitat across multiple gardens to find enough food, safe nest sites, and mates — meaning that individual good practice has limited benefit without neighborhood-scale garden network connectivity. The specific welfare harms that urban environments impose on hedgehogs are mostly preventable: slug pellet poisoning through alternative pest control, strimmer injuries through checking before cutting, drowning through pond ramps, and boundary barriers through hedgehog holes. The aggregation of many small individual actions — fence holes, pellet substitutes, pond ramps — across a neighborhood creates the connected, safe habitat network that supports hedgehog welfare and population viability.