Hedgehogs are solitary, wide-ranging foragers that travel up to 2 km nightly in search of invertebrate prey, and understanding their territorial and foraging needs is critical for effective welfare support.
Hedgehog foraging welfare is determined by the invertebrate abundance of their home range. In gardens and farmland with high pesticide use, invertebrate populations are severely depleted — hedgehogs must range farther to find adequate food, increasing the time spent crossing roads and exposed to predators. Slug pellet poisoning (metaldehyde) caused direct deaths by neurotoxicity; the 2022 UK ban removed the most acutely toxic slug control chemical. Organic-rich garden soil managed without pesticides supports abundant earthworm and beetle populations that provide reliable, high-quality hedgehog prey. Individual garden management decisions, aggregated across millions of UK gardens, have a measurable effect on the invertebrate food web that hedgehogs depend on.