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Too prickly to be a pet

- Com­piled by Charles Legge Pets · Hobbies · United Kingdom · Ludlow · Shropshire · Malta · Cyprus · Bulgaria · Montenegro · Turkey · Jordan · Vanuatu · Caribbean · Antigua and Barbuda · Saint Kitts and Nevis · Nevis · Saint Kitts · European Union · Schengen Area · Grenada · England · Church of England · Montego Bay · Jamaica · Kent · London · Antigua · Granada · ITV Studios · Canterbury

QUES­TION

Can a hedge­hog be kept as a pet?

Wild hedge­hogs should not be kept as pets, but be re­garded as wel­come wild night-time vis­i­tors to the gar­den.

They can be­come used to the peo­ple who share the gar­dens they fre­quent and en­joy meaty cat or dog food or cat bis­cuits to sup­ple­ment their diet and some wa­ter to drink.

En­sure they can get into the gar­den by cre­at­ing 13cm x 13cm (5in x 5in) square gaps in bound­aries. En­cour­age your neigh­bours to do the same — hedge­hogs travel around a mile a night and that’s a lot of gar­dens.

They have re­cently been added to the UK red list as vul­ner­a­ble to ex­tinc­tion, so it’s vi­tal we do ev­ery­thing we can to help them. Check care­fully be­fore mow­ing or strim­ming, and cover drains where hedge­hogs can be­come trapped.

Move bon­fire piles to a new site be­fore light­ing to en­sure a hedge­hog is not hid­ing within it, and check be­fore turn­ing a com­post heap.

Add a slop­ing edge or half-sub­merged rocks to ponds and pools. Hedge­hogs can swim, but drown if they can’t es­cape.

You can use our prickly friends as an ex­cuse to do a bit less work in the gar­den by leav­ing an edge or cor­ner to grow wild, of­fer­ing shade and shel­ter for hogs as well as a bug buf­fet.

Stop­ping the use of poi­sons and pes­ti­cides in the gar­den is an­other plus. Hedge­hogs may be harmed by in­gest­ing poi­son. At the very least it de­stroys their food chain.

Store sports nets out of the way and make sure plant net­ting is a foot above ground level so hedge­hogs don’t get en­tan­gled in it. A log pile of­fers nat­u­ral food and shel­ter. Plans for build­ing a hedge­hog home in the gar­den in readi­ness for their hi­ber­na­tion can be found at www.british­hedge­hogs.org.uk

Fay Vass, Bri­tish Hedge­hog Preservati­on So­ci­ety, Lud­low, Shrop­shire.

QUES­TION In which coun­tries can you buy cit­i­zen­ship?

YoU can buy cit­i­zen­ship in 12 coun­tries: Malta, Cyprus, Bul­garia, Mon­tene­gro, Tur­key, Jor­dan, Van­u­atu and the Caribbean is­lands of St lu­cia, An­tigua and Bar­buda, St Kitts and Ne­vis, Granada and do­minica.

A second pass­port of­fers var­i­ous ben­e­fits such as more op­tions for liv­ing, trav­el­ling, do­ing busi­ness, in­vest­ing and, po­ten­tially, avoid­ing taxes.

Per­haps the most de­sir­able second pass­port is that of Malta. This small EU mem­ber state of 500,000 peo­ple, spread over three is­lands, of­fers an EU pass­port with visa-free travel to 158 coun­tries and uses English as a second lan­guage.

in 2013, fol­low­ing the euro debt cri­sis, the par­lia­ment in­sti­tuted the Malta in­di­vid­ual in­vestor Pro­gramme. To ob­tain cit­i­zen­ship, an in­vestor must con­trib­ute € 650,000 to the Mal­tese Na­tional developmen­t and So­cial Fund, in­vest €350,000 in prop­erty and buy €150,000 of government-ap­proved bonds.

Ad­di­tional pay­ments of €25,000 are needed for spouses and chil­dren un­der 25; €50,000 for older chil­dren and par­ents.

in 2013, Cyprus’s off­shore fi­nan­cial in­dus­try, its prime source of in­come, col­lapsed in a cor­rup­tion scan­dal.

To raise money, it be­gan of­fer­ing cit­i­zen­ship for € 3 mil­lion of di­rect in­vest­ment. Rus­sian cit­i­zens, the big­gest vic­tims of the crash, were el­i­gi­ble for cit­i­zen­ship if they had lost more than €3 mil­lion.

Since then, the price of Cypriot cit­i­zen­ship has been cut sig­nif­i­cantly. To­day, an in­vest­ment of €2 mil­lion in prop­erty is re­quired, plus a do­na­tion of €100,000 to the government’s re­search and developmen­t fund and €100,000 to the land developmen­t or­gan­i­sa­tion.

Ben­e­fits in­clude an EU pass­port with visa-free travel to 152 coun­tries (six fewer than Malta be­cause it is not part of the Schen­gen area). The Caribbean is­lands are cheaper, be­low £500,000, and con­fer tax ben­e­fits, but pass­ports are less use­ful. A pass­port from An­tigua and Bar­buda al­lows visa-free travel to only 129 coun­tries; St lu­cia, 123 coun­tries; and Gre­nada, 122.

Ja­son Grew, Wolver­hamp­ton, W. Mids. QUES­TION Why was the 1831 Ja­maican slave up­ris­ing called the Bap­tist War?

JA­MAiCAN plan­ta­tion own­ers were strongly against mis­sion­ar­ies preach­ing the Gospel to the is­land’s 300,000 slaves, who were not al­lowed to be­come mem­bers of the Church of Eng­land.

This opened the way for Non­con­formist mis­sion­ar­ies — Bap­tist, Wes­leyan and Methodist — to teach slaves the Bi­ble. The Bap­tists Wil­liam Knibb, Thomas Burchell and James Phillipo were prom­i­nent abo­li­tion­ists.

Sa­muel ‘daddy’ Sharpe was a house slave for a Mon­tego Bay so­lic­i­tor. He took the sur­name of his mas­ter in ac­cor­dance with tra­di­tion and was a dea­con at the lo­cal Bap­tist church.

Sharpe be­came con­vinced eman­ci­pa­tion in Ja­maica was be­ing sup­pressed by the planters. He planned a non-vi­o­lent with­drawal of labour over Christ­mas 1832.

Strikes were planned across the St James es­tates. But by the night of de­cem­ber 27, it had spilled into vi­o­lence and the mili­tia were out in force.

The light­ing of a bea­con at the high­est point of the Kens­ing­ton plan­ta­tion started a re­bel­lion of 60,000 slaves. Cane fields and great houses were set ablaze and 14 white peo­ple were killed. The mili­tia re­sponded with ex­treme force, shoot­ing 1,000 slaves.

Within 11 days the re­bel­lion was quashed. Mag­is­trates handed down 300 ex­e­cu­tion or­ders dur­ing a six-week trial.

Just be­fore Sharpe was hanged in the Mon­tego Bay square that to­day bears his name, he said: ‘i would rather die upon yon­der gal­lows than live in slav­ery.’ His own­ers were paid £16 in ‘com­pen­sa­tion for their loss of prop­erty’.

While the re­bel­lion is called the Bap­tist War due to its abo­li­tion­ist roots, it is also re­ferred to as Sam Sharpe’s War or the Christ­mas Up­ris­ing. Slav­ery was abol­ished in Ja­maica two years later.

Mark K. Knott, Can­ter­bury, Kent.

IS THERE a ques­tion to which you want to know the an­swer? Or do you know the an­swer to a ques­tion here? Write to: Charles Legge, An­swers To Cor­re­spon­dents, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, Lon­don W8 5TT; or email charles.legge@dai­ly­mail.co.uk. A selection is pub­lished, but we’re un­able to en­ter into in­di­vid­ual cor­re­spon­dence. Visit mailplus.co.uk to hear the An­swers To Cor­re­spon­dents pod­cast

?? ?? Cute as a but­ton: A hedge­hoglet
Cute as a but­ton: A hedge­hoglet

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