Apocalypse hedgehog: the fight to save Britain's favourite mammal

The much-loved creature of the suburban garden is in rapid decline - with new builds, roads and badgers to blame. Can we prevent their extinction?

Hit by a car. Savaged by a dog. Slashed by a strimmer. Burnt in a bonfire. Tangled in garden netting. Poisoned by slug pellets. Caught in a postman's discarded rubber bands. Head stuck in a tin can. Tricked out of hibernation by increasingly unpredictable winter weather. Modern life, governed by humans, designs a multitude of ingenious ways for a hedgehog to die. It is no wonder that this treasured animal, a suburban garden fixture, which consistently tops favourite-species polls and is the source of many people's first close encounter with a wild creature, is vanishing from Britain.

This disappearance is rapid, and recent. A survey of more than 2,600 people by BBC Gardeners' World Magazine in February found that 51% of gardeners didn't see a hedgehog at all last year, up from 48% in 2015. Barely one in 10 saw a hedgehog regularly. Scientific studies are unequivocal. Britain's hedgehog population was calculated to be 1.55 million in 1995. Since the turn of the century it has declined by a third in urban areas and up to 75% in the countryside. A survey based on roadkill calculates that hedgehogs are declining by 3% each year. This exceeds the International Union for Conservation of Nature red list criteria, which identifies species at greatest conservation risk. Why are we obliterating hedgehogs? Will they become extinct? Or can we save them?