What actually kills hedgehogs

Last reviewed 25 August 2026. These are the causes rescues and the published surveys record most often. Listed because they are the ones a person can do something about, not in order of how many animals each accounts for — no national figure apportioning deaths between them has been identified.

In gardens

• Strimmers and mowers. A hedgehog's response to danger is to curl up rather than run, which is the wrong strategy against a blade. Checking long grass by hand before cutting is the whole mitigation.
• Netting and litter. Football nets, fruit netting, pea netting and discarded plastic are a common admission. Netting raised well clear of the ground, or taken down when not in use, removes the risk.
• Bonfires. A built pile is an ideal nest site. Moving the pile to a fresh spot immediately before lighting is the reliable check; searching it in place is not.
• Ponds and pools. Hedgehogs swim but drown when they cannot climb out. A sloping edge, a ramp or a partly submerged plank resolves it.
• Slug pellets and insecticides. These reduce the invertebrate prey a hedgehog lives on, quite apart from any direct effect.
• Enclosed gardens. A hedgehog ranges over a far larger area than one garden, and continuous close-boarded fencing cuts that range up. A gap of roughly 13cm square at the base of a fence — what the BHPS and PTES campaign calls a hedgehog highway — restores it.

Beyond the garden

Roads, the loss of hedgerows and permanent grassland, and the fragmentation of habitat are the pressures the State of Britain's Hedgehogs report associates with the rural decline. They are not things an individual resolves, and this page does not pretend otherwise.

What the evidence does not settle

Badgers eat hedgehogs, and the relationship between the two is repeatedly raised in public argument about both species. It is a real predator-prey relationship and it is also used as an argument for culling badgers. This site reports that the argument is made and that it is contested; it does not adjudicate it, and no figure here should be read as supporting either side. The badger section sets out the culling position separately.

Sources: the State of Britain's Hedgehogs 2022 (BHPS and PTES) and the hedgehog highway guidance published by the same two organisations.