In a garden, at the dacha or in a kitchen garden the people often meet hedgehogs. Someone even feeds up them. Generally prickly small animals are treated cow with milk. Small animals with pleasure it regale, without suspecting about the hidden danger of such food to their health. It is not difficult to make friends with these forest inhabitants if to have elementary knowledge of their feeding.
It is a little about hedgehogs
The hedgehog is an insectivorous animal. Contrary to it hedgehogs eat not only insects, but also small rodents, snails and slugs, frogs. Quite often they steal from hen houses of egg. In lean year the small animals wish to regale on vegetation: strawberry, mushrooms, grass.
These animals, despite the stereotype imparted by it, do not back mushrooms, apples and candies. Such cargo they not on force and do not want to spoil needles at all. On prickly backs of hedgehogs it is possible to see only small forest garbage: leaves, branches, blades.
In gardens and kitchen gardens the hedgehogs, as a rule, drop in on people at night as this time of day for them is hunting. While there is nobody, uninvited guests smartly run in search of food, exterminating mean insects (a medvedok, ants), small rodents (mice) and if carries – regale from bowls on the dog or cat's canned food left on the street.
Sometimes these small animals can be met at the dacha or in a garden day in the afternoon. In this case people volunteer to feed up them. Unfortunately, the main food in such situation is milk, and cow. It is necessary to understand whether it is possible to feed a hedgehog with such milk.
Whether it is possible to feed hedgehogs with milk?
These remains in an organism have no enzyme splitting lactose. If to offer a hedgehog cow's milk, he, of course, will drink it, but shortly will begin to suffer from an indigestion. Sometimes at hedgehogs the food poisoning is observed, diarrhea begins.
Moreover, at cow's milk there are antibodies which can just ruin an organism of a little small animal. So the zoologist of Moscow Zoo Alexey Turovsky claims. At the same time the expert notes that it does not concern some goat or dog milk.
The zoologist explains terrible effect of cow's milk for hedgehogs with the fact that under natural conditions dwellings such food for them is completely excluded. "Not to make to an animal it is worse, in general you should not feed him", - Turovsky says about hedgehogs. The zoologist claims that any wild animal if it is healthy, able to support itself.
"The standard opinion that hedgehogs hungry also want to eat – delusion", - the zoologist notes. In the summer of problems with food at hedgehogs really is not present. However during the early spring period these small animals nevertheless need food.
In this case hedgehogs can be fed with improvised food: cat's or dog forage, crude eggs, boiled sausage, tomatoes, lettuce leaves, apples, carrots, pears. Whenever possible after feeding the hedgehog should pour fresh cool water into a bowl.