A YEAR or so ago a report claimed the reintroduction of brown bears and wolves into Britain could have a beneficial impact on the environment.

Not on mine it wouldn’t. The idea of dangerous animals being reintroduced strikes me as being about as bizarre as a royal enthusiast for field sports being a former president of the World Wildlife Fund. (No offence, Prince Philip.) I may know about as much about nature as a purple nine-legged ant but I’ve always been mightily relieved that the most dangerous beast I’m likely to encounter in Britain is the adder. Or, the hedgehog, should you accidentally sit on one.

And I am concerned by the report that our native hedgehogs are in trouble. It is now three years since I last came across a live hedgehog so can well believe that their numbers have fallen from 30 million when Mrs Tiggy-Winkle was in her prime, to a mere 1.5 million today.

So I’m rooting for the hedgehogs. And to someone as disinclined to spend their time gardening as I am, the call to have wildlife area in the garden is music to the ears. We’ve not helped our hedgehogs by losing our hedgerows we should do all we can to help hedgehogs which are just very appealing creatures.

The worst thing you can say hedgehogs is that they gave rise to joke so bad that it was judged the funniest at the Edinburgh Fringe a couple of years ago. (“Hedgehogs? Why can’t they just share the hedge?”) Like comics at the old Glasgow Empire, we should do all we can to stop this species from dying.