New Zealand wants to exterminate the hedgehogs

The country is even thinking of eradicating them because they are wreaking havoc as there are no predators that can hunt them

He is about to end up run over, his mother saves him

Round, tender and thorny. Hedgehogs, in our imagination, are graceful and not at all scary animals. The inhabitants of New Zealand do not think the same way for which they are a real "plague".

This is how the Auckland City Council recently called them. The country is even thinking of eradicating them because they are wreaking havoc, to the detriment of native species.

Hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus) were first brought to New Zealand by European settlers. Around 1860, Nelson's Provincial Council and Wellington's Colonial Parliament introduced legislation to encourage the importation of animals that

they would have contributed to the pleasure and profit of the inhabitants.

Subsequently, their introduction was also justified as a way to control garden pests such as snails and grass larvae. According to a 1975 report in the New Zealand Journal of Zoology, the very first hedgehogs arrived in Canterbury in 1869. The numbers appear to have increased dramatically on the South Island between 1910 and 1940 and were first recorded in Twizel around 1940 -1949. They appear to have been deliberately transported and released across the country.

Because New Zealand wants to eliminate them

But now something has changed. Along with rats, stoats and opossums, they are considered destructive predators.

They are actually a very destructive predator and parasite that we really need to get rid of

Tim Lovegrove of the Auckland board told Seven Sharp.

The eradication program is expected to begin in July in 2.300 hectares of the Mackensie Basin in the center of the South Island. Te Manahuna Aoraki has given itself a year to defeat what it now considers an invasive species, which is not threatened by any predator unlike Europe, where these animals are in decline and are hunted by martens, stone martens, foxes and badgers.

In New Zealand they are accused of swallowing large quantities of the eggs of endemic birds, lizards or locusts. But that's not all: kiwis, the symbolic birds of New Zealand, are deprived of food.

Hedgehogs aren't the only species targeted in the country that is campaigning to eliminate all invasive predators by 2050. Wild cats will also have the same fate as hedgehogs.

Sources of reference: Te Manahuna Aoraki, TVnz,