Splat! goes the hedgehog. A roadside sight we are sadly all too familiar with. And yet it’s not just on the tarmac where these beloved creatures often meet their untimely demise, but on the soft, carpeted lawns of people’s gardens. Precisely when the owners of said gardens decide their lawns could do with a haircut and whip out robotic lawnmowers.

The humble hedgehog is already facing a serious decline in numbers due to loss of habitat, road accidents, modern farming techniques and injuries from dog bites and garden strimmer's. And now robotic lawnmowers pose yet another threat. Particularly when households use them to cut the grass at night, which is when hedgehogs are most active.

Help is on the way, however, as a team led by researchers at Oxford University has run a series of tests to work out how hedgehog and mower can live together in relative harmony. The researchers began their collision tests using dead hedgehogs – a rather morbid thought but, since the robotic mower would sometimes run straight over the body, leaving it looking more like a toast rack than the countryside cutie we all know and love, it was probably for the best.

Interestingly, once the tests had moved on to live hedgehogs, the researchers discovered that the hedgehogs tended to react more cautiously on their second encounter with a (bladeless!) robotic lawnmower, suggesting they have learnt from their fi rst experience and are keen not to end up yet another gruesome statistic. This is great news as robotic lawnmowers don’t have to be a danger to hedgehogs! As part of the tests, the researchers developed a hedgehog version of a car-crash dummy and intend to make the design publicly available for 3D printing so that robotic lawnmower companies can incorporate it into their own tests to make the little robots hedgehog-friendly.

It goes without saying that the more hedgehog-friendly mowers there are in the world, the greater the chance that the first robotic mower a hedgehog meets is one that will just give it a gentle nudge before roaming off in the opposite direction, or can avoid it all together, rather than one that will slice it limb from prickly limb. Then their little hedgehoggy brains will remind them to be more cautious should they meet another robotic lawnmower later in life.

Making the switch to hedgehog-friendly robotic lawnmowers will have a big impact on hedgehogs’ chances of making it to old age. In the meantime, the best way to minimise the risk of a hedgehog massacre is to use robotic lawnmowers during daylight hours only and to check the area for any rogue hedgehogs that are still out from the previous night.

Genevieve Silk