Hedgehog activists prepare to fight cull

THE battle lines were being drawn last night as animal rights activists and trappers arrived in the Western Isles for the second spring cull of hedgehogs.

Trappers, hired by Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) and its partners, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Scottish Executive, have been sent to North Uist and Benbecula to wipe out the prickly predators in a bid to protect the internationally important populations of native wading birds.

But a number of animal rights campaigners have also arrived on the Uists, determined to disrupt the cull and to rescue as many hedgehogs as they can during the eight-week operation.

Last spring, trappers caught and killed just 66 hedgehogs on the islands at an estimated cost of 100,000 while animal activists relocated 156 hedgehogs to the mainland.

The 13 trappers, recruited by the partnership in the Uist Wader Project, will be hunting for the hedgehogs, fresh from their winter hibernation, as they emerge in the darkness to forage for food, using powerful lights to find the animals caught in live traps.

Captured animals will then be taken to a facility where they will be anaesthetised with gas, before being given a lethal injection.

Stuart Housden, the director of RSPB Scotland, said the cull was needed to protect several species of ground-nesting birds, including dunlin, redshank, snipe, lapwing and oystercatcher, which had no defence against predatory hedgehogs.

A survey, carried out in the mid-1980s, showed that the islands held at least 17,000 pairs of breeding waders. But since then the wader population has halved and the blame has been pinned on the hedgehogs eating the birds’ eggs.

Mr Housden said: "All over the world we have seen serious ecological implications when a non-native species is introduced to a new area - particularly if it is an island.

"Sadly, the introduction of hedgehogs to the Western Isles has had disastrous consequences for the islands’ internationally important populations of wading birds."

Dr Jeff Watson, a spokesman for SNH, said: "Our hope was that culling could be avoided. Fences were tried and continue to be used in some localised circumstances, but the islands are large and the problem too widespread.

"Hedgehog contraception was investigated but is not currently available. We will keep methods under review."

Meanwhile, a number of activists from Uist Hedgehog Rescue (UHR), a coalition of animal welfare groups, have also descended on the islands to try to save as many hedgehogs as possible from being killed.

They are offering islanders a 20 cash reward for each hedgehog brought to them for relocation to the mainland, an increase of 15 on last year’s bounty.

A spokesman for the rescue group described the decision to resume the cull as "quite illogical and wholly irresponsible".