On Maru

I make no secret that I have a pet hedgehog. Contrarily, I tell practically everybody I meet. I keep albums of photos on my iPod and mobile phone and show them, endearingly, to anybody who will look. You can say I like my pet. That would be an understatement.

Here are a few of the questions I always get when my chosen pet is revealed:

What is that there and why does it look sharp?

Maru is an African pygmy hedgehog, bred by a breeder in Pennsylvania and purchased at a pet store that specializes in exotics on Long Island. She was eight weeks old when I purchased her. She is now three and a half. Yes her quills are sharp, but her underside is not.

That some crazy name, yo.

Maru is Japanese for circle or ball.

What is having a hedgehog like?

It’s like owning a very sharp hamster.

Why a hedgehog?

At the time that I was looking for a pet, I was living in an apartment directly over a business, so I couldn’t get anything that didn’t live in a cage. I don’t get dogs and while I understand that this isn’t a popular stance to take, they’re simply not for me. My view on it is that I don’t want a pet on whose schedule I’m paying to live and the punishment for failing to live on that schedule is pee everywhere.

As such I’m naturally a cat person, but cosmic forces with a sense of humor beyond my control (read: genetics) decided that my lungs would not share my fervor for felines. So save for rolling the dice on a Siberian or ragdoll, two expensive breeds of cats that people with allergies tend to have more luck with but it’s not guaranteed, I will stick to our friends who live in cages.

Which leaves me with a lot of choices these days:

Hamsters: Too pedestrian

Gerbils: Had many of them when I was young, got them out of my system

Mice: See also: Hamsters

Rats: Extremely smart, but still too pedestrian

Snakes (big): I don’t have control over my thermostat so I can’t properly keep the temperature regulated as I’d need to

Snakes (small): In truth I’d love to get a small snake, but again, the temperature thing

Lizards (all kinds): Temperature thing and they just don’t interest me

Tarantula: Too tempting to kill it every time I see it

Scorpion: Get the heck out of my house demon

Bird (all kinds): Had them when I was younger. Too loud when happy/sad/complacent/angry/disheveled/mildly perturbed

Bunnies: POOP

Sugar gliders: Too loud when angry, need to buy two, cost $250 each

Which left me with hedgehogs. Luckily I find them extremely cute.

Is there anything I should know about owning a hedgehog? (Abridged)

Hedgehogs aren’t the easiest pet to take care of, and there’s a lot they should know. Unfortunately I’m a tad pressed for time while writing this blog post, so I’ll cover only the one with the funny sounding name: poop booties.

What the heck are poop booties?

Poop booties are a phenomenon known to hedgehog owners who have a wheel in their hogs’ cage. Hedgehog’s feet are different from a hamster’s feet, so when buying a wheel you have to avoid those wire wheels; a hedgie’s feet can get caught in them as they run and that could lead to an injured hedgie. Instead, if you can’t give the hog a place big enough for it to run around all the time, you need to give it a wheel that’s solid. This is great, as Maru loves her wheel and runs for hours each night. While running she consistently stops, looks around, runs runs runs, stops, looks around, runs runs runs.

This is fine until she adds one more action into the mix: runs runs runs, stops, looks around, poops in the wheel, and keeps on running. The result is a wheel coated in poop (it’s easy to clean off once you get the hang of it; baking soda is your friend) and a hedgehog whose feet are covered in poop. Nothing a long bath won’t fix.

Maru has since grown out of poop booties (she’s a smart girl) but if you’re considering a hedgehog, consider yourself warned.

What was buying a hedgehog like?

I did a lot of reading on hedgehogs prior to deciding to go ahead with the purchase and, in the end, it was a spur of the moment decision. I read that they like warm rooms and surfaces (if it gets to cold they can try to hibernate which unfortunately often leads to death), they’re insectivores with a voracious appetite for mealworms, crickets and anything else small and crunchy they can get their tongues on and, like hamsters, their eyesight isn’t very good so they operate mostly on smell.

I used to live just a few blocks from an exotic pet store, so I went in one day and much to my surprise they had a brand new litter of hedgehogs, both girls and boys. I asked one of the employees if I could take one of the hogs out so feel what they were like, as I had never met one in person before. The guy slid the female cage out and all the hedgehogs rolled into a ball and tensed up.

Now, when a hedgehog is calm, their quills lie flat back like fur and it’s easy to pat them in a way that you won’t get poked. When they’re tense or scared, they shoot up and stick in all directions (imagine giving yourself goosebumps, with sharp sticks poking out of your pores).

If you absolutely must pick up a hedgehog as it’s freaking out, it’s recommended that you either wear thick gloves or just pick up a handful of bedding underneath it. The guy did the latter. He picked up one of the hogs and placed it on the top of the cage. This hog stayed in the ball, not trusting anything in the outside world. He picked up another one and put it on the top of the cage next to the first. Now two hogs, all balled up, lay quivering on the cage top. He reached into the cage and picked up a third, slightly smaller female. When he dropped the third onto the top of the cage, this hog instantly uncurled, looked and sniffed around for a second before diving face first back into the cage.

“I’ll take that one,” I said.

And here we are.