Hedgehogs: protection and status

Last reviewed 25 August 2026. Figures are attributed to the body that published them. This is a description of the law, not legal advice.

What the law actually protects

Hedgehogs are protected, but less broadly than most people assume, and the difference matters if you are trying to work out whether something you have seen is an offence.

• Methods, not the animal. The hedgehog is listed in Schedule 6 to the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, which is headed “animals which may not be killed or taken by certain methods”. Section 11 of the Act prohibits those methods — among them self-locking snares, traps, nets and poisons. Schedule 6 does not make it an offence to kill a hedgehog by other means.
• Cruelty is separately an offence. The Wild Mammals (Protection) Act 1996 makes it an offence to mutilate, kick, beat, impale, stab, burn, crush, drown, drag or asphyxiate any wild mammal with intent to inflict unnecessary suffering. That covers a hedgehog whatever the method.
• Once you pick one up, a different Act applies. A hedgehog taken into care is an animal for which a person is responsible, so the welfare duties of the Animal Welfare Act 2006 — and its equivalents in Scotland and Northern Ireland — attach to whoever is keeping it.

The practical effect is that most of what is driving the decline is not unlawful. A strimmer, a football net, a bonfire and a slug pellet are not offences under Schedule 6, which is why the hazards page below is the useful one rather than this page.

Conservation status

• The hedgehog is assessed as Vulnerable in Great Britain on the Mammal Society's regional Red List — the assessment that also placed a quarter of Britain's native mammals at risk of extinction.
• The Mammal Society reports that the European hedgehog is now listed as Near Threatened globally on the IUCN Red List.
• The State of Britain's Hedgehogs 2022, published by the British Hedgehog Preservation Society and the People's Trust for Endangered Species, found rural populations had continued to fall by between a third and three quarters nationally since 2000, with the largest declines in the eastern half of England.
• The same report found the urban picture different: urban populations appear to have stabilised and may be beginning to recover.

Rural down, urban steadier, is the same shape as the gull picture and it should be read the same way. It does not mean there are more hedgehogs. It means the places they are being lost from and the places they are holding on are not the same places.

The report is published every three to four years, so the 2022 edition is the current one at the date above. Check for a newer edition before citing these figures.