Sally Coulthard

“If you unpack the relationship between people and hedgehogs over the years, it’s not always been an easy one. From the earliest written texts that feature hedgehogs, it seems they’ve been misunderstood. Pliny, writing only a few decades after the birth of Christ, talked with great confidence about hedgehogs catching food by impaling it on their spines:

'They wallow and roll themselves upon apples and such fruit lying under foot, and so catch them up with their prickles, and one more besides they take in their mouth, & so carrie them into hollow trees.'

Medieval manuscripts continue the error – the 12th-century Aberdeen Bestiary describes

'The hedgehogs, covered in bristles, roll up in a ball, and carry grapes back to their young by impaling them on their spines.'

It seems no one had bothered to actually watch a hedgehog at work.”
― Sally Coulthard, The Hedgehog Handbook