Feeding & Nutrition

Bramble was a hoglet the size of my palm when he moved in, barely old enough to be away from his mother, and from the start he had opinions about food that he expressed by simply turning his face away. Mealworms were supposed to be his favorite. The bag in my fridge said they were, right there on the front in bright letters, a cartoon hedgehog smiling over the word "treats." Bramble disagreed with the cartoon hedgehog.

I'd pull a worm from the container, cold and slightly stiff from the fridge, drop it into his dish, and he'd sniff, recoil like it had offended him personally, and shuffle off to the hide he'd made under a folded towel in the corner of his bin. This went on for the better part of a week. I started to worry he was sick. Hedgehogs are good at hiding illness, better than most pets, and a hoglet that won't eat is a hoglet you watch closely, because they can go downhill fast at that size.

Then one evening, almost by accident, I warmed a worm between my fingers before offering it, just to take the fridge chill off while I was thinking about something else. He took it from my hand. Then another. Then he stood on his back legs, the way they do when they want more, and waited with his nose twitching and his little snout pointed at the dish like a thief casing a vault.

The cold was the problem

It shouldn't have taken me that long to work out. Hedgehogs are insect eaters, and in the wild their food is room temperature at worst, sun-warmed at best, something that moved a moment ago and still carries the heat of the day. A worm straight from a four-degree fridge is a dead, cold thing, limp and uninteresting, and a picky young hedgehog treats it like something that washed up on a beach. Once the worm was warm to the touch, it moved like prey again when he nudged it, or at least smelled like it should, and his instinct to eat switched on.

I didn't start cooking his meals or anything elaborate. I just let the portion I was about to feed sit on the counter for ten minutes while I cleaned his bin, or cupped it in my hand until the chill was gone. In winter, when the apartment dips below comfortable, I'd set the dish near the heat lamp in his enclosure for a minute before he came out to forage at dusk. He's always been a nocturnal eater, so his real meals happened after lights out, and a warm worm at midnight got a far better reception than a cold one at noon, when he'd still be curled in his towel anyway.

There's a broader point hiding in this small fix. People buy the right food and assume the animal will eat it because the label says "complete" or "favorite" or shows a happy cartoon. But temperature, texture, and even the smell of something fresh matter more than the marketing on the bag. My sister's hedgehog eats the exact same brand cold without a complaint in the world, so it isn't only the food. It's the individual. Bramble just happens to be a snob about temperature, and now that I know it, it costs me nothing to accommodate him.

These days his bowl goes in warm, and he cleans it every night, leaving the empty dish turned over like a trophy. The fridge worms stay crisp for storage, which is fine, because the warming happens right before they reach him, never in a way that spoils the rest. Simple fix, and I felt a little stupid for not trying it sooner. The hoglet, naturally, has never apologized for the week of worry he caused.

Portion control turned out to matter more than I expected with such a tiny animal. A hoglet eats surprisingly little, and I'd been offering three or four worms when one warm worm was plenty for a snack and two for a meal. The rest sat in the dish and went soft, which he then ignored for being stale, so warming helped and so did simply offering less. There's a particular smell to a hedgehog's dinner hour, a warm-insect sweetness that fills the room, and Bramble's nose starts working the moment I open the container. He knows the sound of the bag now, and he knows the difference between cold and warm before I've even offered it.

One cold January night the power dipped and the heat lamp flickered, and I found Bramble huddled deeper than usual, the worm I'd warmed going cool in my hand faster than he could eat it. I learned to warm two at a time after that, one in the dish and one cupped in my palm as a backup, so the second was ready the moment the first was gone. He never knew the difference, but I did, and a hoglet who eats without hesitation on the coldest night of the year is a small thing you take seriously.