{"id":166067,"date":"2025-09-24T12:30:13","date_gmt":"2025-09-24T12:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/166067\/"},"modified":"2025-09-24T12:30:13","modified_gmt":"2025-09-24T12:30:13","slug":"we-have-turned-our-home-in-burtisland-into-a-hedgehog-hospital","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/166067\/","title":{"rendered":"We have turned our home in Burtisland into a hedgehog hospital"},"content":{"rendered":"

Angie BrownEdinburgh and east reporter<\/p>\n

\"AndyAndy Longhurst<\/p>\n

Sharon Longhurst is so devoted to helping hedgehogs that she hasn’t had a holiday in almost three years<\/p>\n

A couple have turned their home in Fife into a hedgehog hospital in a bid to help the spiky mammals recuperate when they are found ill or injured.<\/p>\n

Sharon and Andy Longhurst have built a maternity ward in their Burntisland garden, an intensive care unit in their garage and they manage a fleet of volunteers in hedgehog ambulances.<\/p>\n

The pair, who often spend all night feeding orphan hoglets, have treated 567 hedgehogs since they set up the Burntisland Hedgehog Haven at their home almost three years ago.<\/p>\n

Sharon, 49, who hasn’t been on holiday since, told BBC Scotland News they were fully trained and hold a licence to care for 40 animals, which they then return to the wild.<\/p>\n

\"SharonSharon Longhurst<\/p>\n

This pregnant hedgehog gave birth at the Longhurt’s home after they freed it from rope from a football net<\/p>\n

The Longhurst’s work with hedgehogs has seen them shortlisted in the animal category of the BBC’s Make a Difference Awards in Scotland<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“If there’s a hedgehog out there that needs help and it’s in pain, I can’t say no, we have to help it,” said Sharon, who is also a lollipop lady. “It’s a full-time job,’ she said.<\/p>\n

“We always say we have to draw a line, we cannot take any more but then you get that phone call and we’re like ‘come on, bring it in.”<\/p>\n

The pair, who have three children, also say people regularly turn up at their home unannounced with hedgehogs that need their care.<\/p>\n

Of all the hedgehogs that have been treated by the Longhurt’s 65% have survived.<\/p>\n

“If we don’t help it, it will just die,” said Andy, who also works as a bus driver in Edinburgh.<\/p>\n

\"SharonSharon Longhurst<\/p>\n

Sharon and Andy said people turn up at their home in Burntisland with hedgehogs that need their help<\/p>\n

The pair are trained in how to care for hedgehogs as well as in first aid for the animals.<\/p>\n

They have also put 90% of their volunteers through the course.<\/p>\n

“We are not vets but we can rehabilitate hedgehogs, anything bigger than a 50 pence piece wound-wise would go straight to the vet and antibiotics are always issued by the vet on an individual case basis,” Sharon said.<\/p>\n

She said it all started when they came across a poorly hedgehog at the side of the road when they were out for a drive to Kirkcaldy.<\/p>\n

“We ended up driving it out to Alloa, which is a 50-mile round trip to get it to the SSPCA wildlife hospital,” Sharon said.<\/p>\n

When they found another poorly hedgehog a couple of weeks later they made the trip again.<\/p>\n

So they turned their house into a rescue centre – with seven ICU units, 40 cages and a team of 18 volunteers help clean the cages and check the animals.<\/p>\n

Since then the couple have had hedgehogs covered in fly larvae, tangled in football nets, unwittingly cut and speared by gardening tools, and bitten by dogs.<\/p>\n

Others have been found with exhaustion, diseases or burnt from pesticides and other chemicals.<\/p>\n

\"AndyAndy Longhurst<\/p>\n

The couple also raise hoglets – often feeding them milk every two hours throughout the night<\/p>\n

The couple also set up the Scottish Hedgehog’s Rescue Alliance, which has centres in Perth, Dundee and Dunbartonshire – where they take hedgehogs if they are at their 40-animal capacity.<\/p>\n

The couple enter running races, hold events, raffles and tombolas in order to keep the operation going, which costs \u00a3800 a month to power seven incubators, as well as food and bedding. They spend a further \u00a33,500 a year on vet bills.<\/p>\n

“We will do all we can for a hedgehog, if it needs X-rays, investigations done we will try and do all we can to get that hedgehog healthy and back out in the wild,” said Sharon.<\/p>\n

“We love hedgehogs so much and there isn’t enough help out there,” she said.<\/p>\n

\"SharonSharon Longhurst<\/p>\n

Brushing fly eggs from a hedgehog<\/p>\n

European hedgehogs are in a steep decline, leading the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to update their status to “near threatened” on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.<\/p>\n

This classification indicates the species is close to qualifying for a threatened category and faces significant risks without intervention, primarily due to habitat loss, fragmentation, and intensive agricultural practices.<\/p>\n

Hedgehogs can live up to five years but often only survive a year in the wild and have two litters of up to six hoglets a year.<\/p>\n

“They’ve got so much against them,” said Andy. “There are so many myths about them.<\/p>\n

“A lot of people think they are riddled with fleas. We’ve only had one with fleas out of 567.<\/p>\n

“We will do this until we are unable to – they are adorable, they are really lovely.”<\/p>\n

\"AndyAndy Longhurst<\/p>\n

Next week, the couple will find out whether they have won their animal category in the BBC’s Make a Difference awards at a ceremony in Glasgow.<\/p>\n

The award also covers the work the couple do to highlight the plight of hedgehogs and debunking myths.<\/p>\n

The winners will also be announced on BBC Radio Scotland’s Mornings programme with Kaye Adams on 29 September.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Angie BrownEdinburgh and east reporter Andy Longhurst Sharon Longhurst is so devoted to helping hedgehogs that she hasn’t…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":166068,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[49,48,66,323],"class_list":{"0":"post-166067","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166067"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166067\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/166068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}