Wild Hedgehog Garden Network Welfare

Urban hedgehog populations depend on networks of connected gardens that allow individuals to range widely enough to meet their territorial and foraging needs, with garden fencing a critical welfare barrier.

Key Facts

Male hedgehogs range up to 3km per night during the active season, crossing multiple garden boundaries in their foraging rounds.
Solid garden fencing prevents hedgehog movement between gardens, fragmenting urban habitat into isolated patches that cannot support viable populations.
A 13x13cm hole at the base of garden fencing or walls allows hedgehog passage while excluding most domestic pets.
The Hedgehog Street campaign has facilitated the creation of hundreds of thousands of 'hedgehog highways' - holes in garden boundaries - across the UK.
Gardens with connected networks support significantly higher hedgehog densities than isolated gardens, demonstrating the population welfare benefit of connectivity.

Welfare Considerations

Hedgehog connectivity welfare reflects the species' ecology: these animals cannot meet their foraging requirements within a single garden, requiring a network of permeable boundaries to access the range needed for adequate nutrition and mate finding. Isolated garden hedgehog populations are effectively trapped, unable to find food during seasonal scarcity, unable to find mates, and unable to disperse juveniles successfully. Creating hedgehog highways through garden boundaries is one of the most impactful and lowest-cost wildlife welfare actions available to householders - a 13cm hole in a fence directly expands a hedgehog's available range. Community-level coordination through Hedgehog Street enables neighborhood-scale connectivity creation.

What You Can Do

Create a 13x13cm hedgehog highway hole in your garden boundary fence or wall.
Register your hedgehog highway with the Hedgehog Street campaign.
Talk to neighbors about creating connected hedgehog highways across your street.
Provide food and water in your garden to support hedgehogs passing through.