Quadrupeds 



6057 



carnivorous, tlioiigli it has struck me since that I have found shigs 

 about garbage and dead animals. 



A friend of mine, a good sportsman and close observer, has told me 

 the following with regard to the hedgehog. He was one day passing 

 under a rookery, and was attracted by a young rook on the ground, 

 having fallen from its nest before it could fly, which was making a 

 great noise, squalling most lustily, and on reaching the spot he found 

 a hedgehog had got hold of him, having seized him by the back, and 

 was mouthing and worrying him, and would no doubt soon have 

 finished him had he not rescued him and destroyed the hedgehog. 

 This anecdote seems to me to set at rest the long arguments pro and 

 con which I have read, in the ' Zoologist' and elsewhere, as to whether 

 hedgehogs are destructive to game or not: this was not an animal in 

 confinement, debarred from his natural food, but, with all the world 

 before him, he had chosen a fat young rook as a dainty morsel. 

 I have over and over again caught them in traps baited with some 

 dead animal, and set for vermin, and used to try and persuade myself 

 that they had got there by accident, but I have since had too many 

 proofs of their delinquencies. 



The same person to whom I am indebted for the above also 

 narrates the following. He found a hedgehog in a meadow, and to 

 kill it he kicked it several times, when it uttered a cry, as he says, 

 resembling a calf; so much so, that some cows in the meadow, who 

 had before taken no notice of him or his proceedings, immediately 

 came up and bellowed round him, and he fully thinks that they 

 imagined he had a calf in some way near him, and he says that the 

 cry, had he not known whence it proceeded, would have deceived 

 him. Now possibly this will be ridiculed, and the peculiar tone 

 emitted by the hedgehog may have been accidental ; but there is no 

 doubt of the fact, as my friend is by no means an imaginative person, 

 but a very matter-of-fact one. Supposing the cry at that time to have 

 been the natural cry of the hedgehog, has he the power of uttering it 

 at pleasure, or are the strenuous kicks of my friend required to bring 

 it forth ? And can it be connected in any way with the old notion of 

 their sucking cows ? as, if they can make the cry at will, it u^ould 

 very much facilitate the operation. It is extraordinary how deep- 

 rooted a prejudice this still is in the minds of country people, if 

 prejudice it is : I confess 1 do not see the great improbability of it. 

 The hedgehog has the power of stretching its neck a long way out 

 from its body, as anybody who watches them running about of a 

 summer's evening may remark for themselves, and we know how 

 XVI. 2 D 



