Slugs & Snails

Gardeners wrongly think having hedgehogs in the garden will keep the slug and snail population down.

• Hedgehogs mainly eat beetles and caterpillars not slugs and snails

• The idea that they only slugs and snails is very wrong 

• They will only eat slugs when they are starving and no other food is available.

• A hedgehog that is forced to rely on slugs and snails will very quickly die.

Slugs and snails are the primary carriers for the lungworm which is  the biggest killer of hedgehogs except for us and our careless behaviour

• When the lungworms breed inside the hedgehog they rapidly multiply, fill the hedgehog's lungs and the hedgehog either dies from drowning (Pneumonia) or bleeding from the lungs.

• Hedgehogs with lungworms have terrible breathing problems, are very thin and underweight, often have bad diarrhoea and will have secondary bacterial infections. Once the worms are well established the hedgehog coughs like an old smoker and gasp for air before dying in agony. Post mortem examinations often show the lungs as a solid mass with very little lung tissue left

Over half of all the hedgehogs brought into Rescue Centres or Wildlife Hospitals in Autumn and Winter die because of the damage the lungworms have done to them. 

Pat Morris in The new Hedgehog Book (ISBN 1873580711) available direct from BHPS  or Amazon.co.uk says:

There is usually a significant prevalence of lungworms in hedgehogs. They cause a type of pneumonia that is often fatal. Lungworms are a special kind of nematode worm and are often very widespread. They are very tiny (invisible without a microscope) but attack the lungs in large numbers. This causes the hedgehog to produce a lot of watery fluid in its air passages and breathing becomes very laboured. Once the worms have established the hedgehog wheezes and coughs as though it had smoked 40 cigarettes a day. Hedgehogs get these parasites as a result of eating slugs and snails within which the parasite larvae live.