Hedgehog found spray-painted in neon colors in Utrecht town
Someone spray-painted in hedgehog in bright yellow, pink, and green in the Utrecht province this week. The critter was found in Zeist on Wednesday morning and is in treatment at the Snorhaar Foundation.
A Zeist local noticed the hedgehog in her garden at 6:00 a.m. on Wednesday. The critter was hard to miss with its spines covered in bright neon colors. She called the Utrecht Animal Ambulance, which took the hedgehog to the Snorhaar Foundation, a wildlife sanctuary that helps small wild mammals.
“This was done deliberately, there’s no other way,” Stef Arens of the Snorhaar Foundation told RTV Utrecht. “We sometimes see a hedgehog accidentally walk through paint. It’s either one color or in a specific spot. When you see how those spots are and how they’re sprayed onto the skin, it was inevitably done on purpose.”
The rescue workers at the Snorhaar foundation sprayed the hedgehog with water and skin oil, and after letting that soak for a while, gave it a bath with dog shampoo. “Then we cleaned the spines one by one with a toothbrush,” Arens said. “It’s not a pleasant treatment for the animal; he was very stressed and kept curling into a ball. Fortunately, he came out completely clean.”
Leaving the paint on was not an option, Arens said. It’s bad for the hedgehog's skin and makes it more visible to predators.
The Snorhaar Foundation often treats hedgehogs abused by people. “Hedgehogs don’t run away; they curl up. This makes them easy to pick up, and that’s when these kinds of scenes happen,” Arens said. “Many baby hedgehogs will be born in the coming weeks, so we hope people will be keeping an eye out for them.”
The graffiti hedgehog will recover at the sanctuary for a few days. He’s doing okay at the moment. “If everything stays okay, we’ll release him back into the wild,” Arens told the broadcaster.
