Lucy......

This is 'Lucy's' story:  She was rescued on 23rd June after she was found curled up and not moving on a footpath at Stanah. She weighed a healthy 885gms on admission and being a female at this time of the year there was always a chance she may be pregnant.  Lucy was a worrying case, she appeared to be extremely traumatised.  Hedgehogs tend to be resilient creatures and cope with all sorts of trauma happening to them, but this was something quite different. I isolated her cage and kept her very quiet.  For four days she did not eat or drink so was kept going on drip fluid injections.  For four days she just stood in her cage not moving, not lying down, not sleeping.  She was also losing an awful lot of her spines, the cage floor was covered in them each day.  This is usually a sign of ringworm / mites but she didn't look to have either.  On the 28th June she had a miscarriage.

For two more days she refused to eat or drink. By now she had worryingly lost nearly 200gms in weight.  On 1st July I was so relieved to see she had finally eaten overnight, and very strangely her spines had suddenly stopped falling out. 

Lucy regained most of her weight loss, is was eating well.  We will never know what terrible thing had happened to Lucy to cause her to be so traumatised to the extreme, but now she is slowly getting back to her normal self.

UPDATE:  Lucy recovered well and has now been released into a safe release garden in Thornton.