Hedgehog predators?

[Oneflewover]

Camped in the garden with the kids the other night, and we were woken up by this awful screaming type noise. I investigated but couldn't see what was causing it in the dark. It went on for 15 minutes maybe, then all quiet. In the morning we found a cleanly disemboweled hedgehog on one of the paths under our trees. The photo is of it a day a half later, so doesn't do it justice. Anyone know anything about hedgehog predators by any chance?

 

[Horners]

Don't know much about it but do you have badgers perchance?

 

[kelper]

My guess would be a fox.

 

[Oneflewover]

Don't know much about it but do you have badgers perchance?

Can't see any evidence of any. We border an open area, a hedge with chain link fence somewhere within its depths. No obvious gap, but could easily be one. Can't see a 'path' though. My initial research suggests badger, but for a reasonably big powerful animal it took a long time to dispatch it then made a very clean job...

 

[Oneflewover]

My guess would be a fox.

Apparently they very rarely take them alive. Lack the strength to open one up according to my research. Could be though.

 

[foxy]

A fox, I remember reading a book as a kid and the author had a rolled up hedgehog skin as a paper weight. He witnessed the fox pee on the hedgehog which made it open up it then skinned the hedge hog and the skin rolled back into a ball.
A fox recently gutted a possum on our front lawn, just some fur and the guts left.
'Weasel in my meat safe' was the book.

 

[kelper]

Badgers are more likely than foxes, to eat hedgehogs but the OP's garden is enclosed. Foxes are able to climb and jump....

 

[regsmith]

Its definitly badgers, they use their claws to open the hog when he is an ball and cleans them out.

 

[kelper]

Is this a HedgehogBadgerForum = HBF?

 

[MyQul]

One of these?

 

[Pirate_Pete]

Badger love a fight.

when I was an apprentice I worked at a place out in the country.
Some of the locals were proper scary. They wouldn't think twice about picking up a badger roadkill.
They said it tasted like pork.

 

[MmmmCitra]

Badger probably, so dry at the moment they are hungry as they struggle to find worms in the hard soil...........

 

[Oneflewover]

Thanks everyone. My money is on badger. Need to find out where it got in as getting chickens soon and don't want it to get them...

 

[Mr_S_Jerusalem]

My dad used to have a badger come to his garden at night and eat the bird food on the floor. He called it Rug.

 

[NPi]

I once had a fox fall through a suspended ceiling in a restaurant, covered in grease from the kitchen extract.

I also heard of a man who was attacked by a cornered badger (thought it was a burglar in his garage), who ripped the nerves out of his leg thinking they were the badgers hairs embedded in his skin.

Between the two, I'd rather fight a fox any day...

 

[Oneflewover]

My dad used to have a badger come to his garden at night and eat the bird food on the floor. He called it Rug.

Think I'll be calling this one something slightly less complimentary if it doesn't p*ss off and stop eating hedgehogs in my garden

 

[Oneflewover]

I once had a fox fall through a suspended ceiling in a restaurant, covered in grease from the kitchen extract.

I also heard of a man who was attacked by a cornered badger (thought it was a burglar in his garage), who ripped the nerves out of his leg thinking they were the badgers hairs embedded in his skin.

Between the two, I'd rather fight a fox any day...

Yes, badgers can be curmudgeonly sods I understand

 

[Clint]

Hope I don't get anything...I got three terriers.
Be a garden full of bits...

 

[Chippy_Tea]

Two posts deleted - Badgers to world poverty (not in this thread)

 

[samale]

Two posts deleted - Badgers to world poverty (not in this thread)