Ellie

 

This baby hedgehog was brought in when she was found collapsed and her mother and the rest of her brothers & sisters had died from lack of food & water. She was about 2 weeks old when she was bought in weighing 94 grammes. Hedgehogs in the wild don't normally leave their nest and their mothers until they are about 7 or 8 weeks old and weigh between 350 & 450 grammes. She will need to stay until she reaches about 500 grammes before she can be released, when she is about 8 /10 weeks old. She was dehydrated, with a quite advanced kidney & urine infection, that needed antibiotic treatment. She needed feeding by hand every 2 hours day and night for the first few days. Then every 4 hours for the next week until she could lap on her own. Once she could lap, she was fed on a mixture of Esbilac & puppy food, after a couple of days of that she started to eat puppy food on her own and now eats very well and has recovered from her infection. Babies are fed on a milk substitute called Esbilac, which is the closest thing to natural hedgehog milk. Esbilac is very expensive to buy, because it has to be imported from the United States and costs over £22 for each container of powdered milk. Please help us to rear & save more baby hedgehogs by helping us to buy this essential milk. Unfortunately as Ellie got older and started to walk we discovered that she had a malformed elbow joint that kept dislocating. This prevented her walking and was causing her severe pain, in fact every time she laid on that side she squealed in pain. So we had to have her put to sleep on veterinary advice, because she would never be able to walk and was in so much pain it wasn't fair on her.
Ellie asleep cuddled up to her toy hedgehog	Ellie asleep with her toy hedgehog
Listing to Ellie's chest with a stethoscope to make sure she is healthy	Just got up & looking for food
Heading for the food bowl	A rear view of Ellie, laying flat out, hanging out of bed after making a pig of herself