Coffee, snails & hedgehog tales

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Hedgehog suffers sore head after getting into real jam

August 5, 2011 - 7:15am Biker saves tiny animal from prickly predicament


by Mark O’Regan
While many are nursing sore heads after last week’s excesses at the Galway Races, one small hedgehog who was discovered with its head stuck in a jam jar last Wednesday in Barna Village is suffering more than most.
Barna local, Enda O’ Byrne describes it as an almost surreal experience when, while driving on his motorbike through the village, he noticed out of the corner of his eye a small hedgehog in a somewhat prickly predicament; the animal was wrestling to remove a large jam jar lodged on its head. The leather-clad biker dismounted and gave a helping hand to the weary animal.
“I saw this thing rolling around at the side of the road. There were two couples pushing prams and they stopped as well. I brought the poor little animal to the local veterinary clinic in Barna on my bike just in the nick of time – he was on the brink of suffocating,” he explains.
As Kathryn Molloy, a nurse working at Barna Veterinary Clinic explains, prising the jar from its neck was not an option as it could have caused more harm than good.
“He was in a very distressed state. His tongue was protruding and blue in colour. We cracked the bottom of the jar and put him in our oxygen chamber for a couple of minutes just to revive him. Once we did that, he was very stressed so it made it very difficult for us to extend the neck and remove the top of the jar,” she said.
“We anesthetised him in our gas chamber which is the size of a lunchbox and that made him more relaxed. It allowed us to extend the neck and then break the top of the glass with a wire cutters. It was all very dramatic as we were trying to break the glass, but it wouldn’t break.”
So, how did the mad hatter get its head stuck in the jar? It turns out the hedgehog was being something of an opportunist and was anxious to sample some food it noticed nestled at the bottom of the jar.
“We discovered a small snail in the jar when we cracked it. Enda came back later that evening and took him back to where he found him – hedgehogs are quite territorial and they like to stay in the same area,” said Kathryn.