The prickly problem of how to heal a hedgehog
‘THAT’S a bit different!’ laughed vet Massimo Vacchetta when he was asked to look after a baby hedgehog one weekend in May 2013.
The tiny creature, weighing only 25 grams, had been brought into the surgery by a woman who’d found it alone in her garden.
Vacchetta set the hoglet on his palm, observed its pink, hairless skin, soft, white spines and front paws with slender toes that looked touchingly human. He snapped a couple of cute selfies to post on social media and then went home for the night.
But, returning in the morning, Vacchetta’s heart was pierced by a soft, small whimper. ‘It stung. It hurt,’ he recalls, this ‘tear-shaped sound’. Though his work brought him into daily contact with the sound of animals in pain, this orphaned hedgehog shattered his ‘shield of professional detachment’.
‘I imagined its mother getting hit by a car while searching for food, flattened on the asphalt. I imagined the baby...fearful, emerging from its nest to search for its mother. In an instant, like a thunderbolt, I felt its utter solitude . . . It was mine as a child.’
Born in Northern Italy in 1967, the sensitive Vacchetta grew up in constant fear his dad, a hypochondriac, would drop dead. Compounding this, his mother worked long hours, so he was always the last child to be collected from school, waiting ‘every day with the same fear that my mum wouldn’t come’.
As an adult, Vacchetta channelled that anxiety into fretting, bitterly, over a failed marriage, as well as his mother’s worsening health. But he found that nurturing the baby hedgehog — a female he called ‘Ninna’ — healed something deep inside his soul.
Connecting with experts around the world, Vacchetta quickly learned the art of hedgehog wrangling. He fed Ninna at two-hour intervals through the night, sourced kitten food and massaged her tummy with almond oil to help her evacuate her bowels.
Walking with her late at night, he learned to listen to the countryside: ‘The crackling of leaves, the music of the crickets, the voices of the nocturnal birds.’ He was tuning in to the internal peace that had always eluded him.
Word got around about Vacchetta’s unusual expertise and local people were soon bringing him other orphaned or injured hedgehogs. Eventually, he set up his own hedgehog sanctuary and called it ‘La Ninna’.
But, having saved and raised Ninna, Vacchetta had to let her go. She was a wild creature, becoming increasingly frustrated and aggressive in captivity. Her appetite fell away. ‘By then, I had released many hedgehogs,’ he says. ‘I’d seen their eyes sparkle like bright stars when they realised they were free. Those little creatures oozed happiness from every quill.’
He finally released Ninna in a garden, beneath a weeping willow tree. In losing her, he found himself and ‘the value of life. Of love. Of helping out’. I loved curling up with his adorable book.