Drunken Hedgehog Day
Modern pest control evolved in the 50’s when the first generation of anticoagulant based rodenticides were produced, if we roll this on to the present time, we now use stronger and more effective chemicals but generally, a lot of rodent pest control is based upon the usage of anticoagulant based rodenticides. But what did people use before the time of what we now call, rat poison?
Well, obviously traps were used and, in my case, and in my personal opinion, that’s still the “go to” for professional rodent control in Maidenhead. Other than using traps it would have been men equipped with small terriers like the Jack Russel, and I am rather biased on this because these are the best dogs in the world, but then I have one.
There are other ways to control rodents and one of these is still celebrated in Hungary and it is called Drunk Hedgehog Day. Yeah, hedgehogs were used back in medieval times to control pests, but unlike the image of a guy with trained terriers these weren’t domesticated or trained in any way, they were just, wild hedgehogs.
The clue to how this happened is in the title of the occasion: drunk. If we go back in time to a place far past the medieval period, in fact around 4 million years past, our hairy monkey ancestors discovered that overripe fruit, especially when its windfallen and bruised, ferments and becomes something highly enjoyable. And they weren’t alone in this discovery, because as we all know, wasps are partial to the sweet liquid leaking out of damaged fruit and they can become a little crazy in the autumn. But it was hedgehogs that became the star of the show, because these little spikey fellas, are a bit prickly when they’re drunk.
The farmers used to put out bowls of alcohol in the autumn for the hedgehogs; they’ve just got the harvest in and they need this food to last to get through the winter, what they can’t risk is rats or mice finding the food and eating their way through it at the same time. So having stumbled across rather cross hedgehogs after a drinking session, they used this knowledge to in a sense, bribe the animals to get rid of pests. Hedgehogs are quite shy creatures but it seems when they’ve had a skinful they get quite riled up, thankfully we don’t use hedgehogs anymore!
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