‘The woman was frantic – it hadn’t eaten or pooed’: what happened when a hat bobble was brought to a hedgehog rescue centre?
March 2024: a fever dream of Tory budgets, Princess of Wales conspiracy theories and, er, hedgehogs that turned out to be hat bobbles. Yes, as Jeremy Hunt gripped the red budget box for the last time, one tale of goodwill gripped our hearts – that of the good Samaritan who mistook a rogue hat bobble on a Cheshire pavement for a sickly hedgehog, and rushed it to animal A&E.
Lost? So was the little guy in question. He was found abandoned on the street in the middle of the day, far from his hedgehog family (a group of hedgehogs is called a prickle, FYI). Except, well, not quite.
“The lady who brought it in was very frantic and worried because she’d kept it in a shoebox overnight but it hadn’t eaten or pooed,” says Janet Kotze, the manager of Lower Moss Wood wildlife hospital in Knutsford, Cheshire. The woman had lined the box with newspaper, given it a hot-water bottle and a blob of wet cat food for sustenance. Kotze – surprised at the weightlessness of the box – examined the little brown mound under the bright lights of the hospital’s triage room, only to discover that it wasn’t a hedgehog, it wasn’t even an animal – it was, in fact, the lopped-off top of a hat.
The good Samaritan “couldn’t believe it when I told her”, says Kotze. Admittedly, it was hedgehog-coloured. But she didn’t stick around – after Kotze’s observation, she took the box and ran. (After Kotze had taken a photograph and circulated it to colleagues who would go on to share it on social media, obviously.) “I was just left behind, completely stunned,” Kotze says.
The rescuer remained anonymous, but in the course of a few days the hospital achieved global fame. “I had people calling me from back home in South Africa asking: ‘What’s going on?’” says Kotze. The not-hedgehog was named Hedgebobble by hospital staff, and led to tens of thousands of Facebook likes and a cascade of donations to the centre. It was welcome, says Kotze.
It also opened the floodgates for an outpouring of Spartacus-esque solidarity, with people fessing up to the weirdest objects they have carted off to an animal hospital. One women thought a bird-pecked fruit loaf in her garden was an animal, she told BBC Breakfast. Another scooped up some horse dung from the middle of the road thinking it was another poorly hedgehog.
But, as with all viral news, what goes up must come down. “The donations were great for a while, but the story sort of ran out of steam,” says Kotze. “With the spiralling costs of energy and food, we’re still in dire straits.” As for the hedgebobble, Kotze is just comforted knowing that there are people out there who care. “There’s quite a lot of sadness in wildlife rescue, because by the time most animals are admitted it’s too late to save them. A heartwarming story was very much needed.”
