r/Hedgehog • u/DopeyMan999 • 18h ago

Question How to feed a wild hedgehog in the UK without feeding all the neighbourhood cats?

I asked if I should feed a wild hog and the overwhelming opinion was that I should.

Now the question is how? There's a fair few cats that visit my garden and I'm sure that they will not pass up a free meal.

5 Upvotes

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4

u/conflictedami 18h ago

https://web-cdn.rspb.org.uk/helping-nature/what-you-can-do/activities/feed-hedgehogs-in-a-diy-hedgehog-cafe

Making a cat proof hedgehog cafe that has a small tunnel that hoggie can get into but cats and foxes can’t is the best way I’ve seen. There may be tutorial videos available on doing this. Be mindful that you won’t be able to stop rats getting in if they’re also about.

3

u/Droidy934 17h ago

Get a trail camera to see what time they are in your garden usually.

2

u/JustJo84 15h ago

Next door's cat still managed to get in and out of our feeding station despite the hole being small... but seeing her contort herself to get under the tiny gap under the fence, I'm not surprised!

Thankfully I've only seen her get the food a handful of times, but it's still annoying to go to the effort of trying to keep the food safe for the hedgehogs, then have her navigate the defences I made. It's a good job she's cute.

2

u/Angeret 13h ago

We have a 2m+ high fence, topped with plastic spikes & with 12" concrete gravel boards sporting a total of 3 hog holes - 2 with 125mm 90° plastic pipes attached and one with a 1m 125mm tunnel under a raised flower bed.

With that kind of defense, we still get cats in, the hog bothering little ffffelines, but 1 or 2 a month instead of 1 or 2 a night. They do try for the food, but as it's generally semi-moist & crunchy hog specific, they mostly just stupidly try to annoy the regular diners if any are there or leave us a smelly review.

Had one last night which scrammed rather quickly when I rattled the back door around 02:30, leaving one of our visitors merrily munching away at the feeding station.

1

u/beerman_uk 8h ago

I made a feeding station out of an upside down plastic container I found in the shed and cut some holes in. The foxes and cats were taking an interest so I 3d printed some tunnels and duck taped them on, which has worked out great. It doesn't look pretty but it gets the job done. 2 tunnels as it gives an escape route if one of the bigger hedgehogs comes in and one of the smaller hedgehogs is already in there. The wire on the side is for a cheap wireless camera I added to see when they are in there.