I like hedgehogs. Maybe too much? Nah, probably not.
I like hedgehogs so much that I have owned three of them in the past. Not at the same time, but that doesn’t mean they were any less of a hassle.
My first hedgehog mysteriously broke her front leg, which got infected, and that spread to her heart, killing her in her sleep.
My second hedgehog was obese and when she didn’t have food constantly in her bowl, she would self-mutilate. Later in her life, she got cervical cancer and bled to death, crying out from the pain despite hedgehogs’ quiet nature.
My third hedgehog was a boy hedgehog I got as a pass-me-down from my cousins later in his life. He was raised with only bad habits, so he attracted an entire swarm of feces flies and then the following maggots into his cage. His ear hygiene was always bad, leading to multiple fungal infections which ate away at his ears. The icing on the cake was the fact that he developed the ever common wobbly hedgehog syndrome, so he slowly grew paralyzed from his back legs up until, like with my first hedgehog, it reached his heart and killed him.
Despite the tragic fates of each of my hedgehogs, I still plan on owning hedgehogs again in the future. I just need to get out of college where my time is already limited first, as well as the accompanying college housing where it is almost always prohibited to have pets.