Friday 12 February 2010

SHE LOVES APPLES!

Four-toed Hedgehogs, aka African Pigmy Hedgehogs (Athelerix albiventrix, which literally means 'white-belly hedgehog'), when in captivity, eat cat food, small worms and crickets, boiled chicken, hardboiled eggs, boiled vegetables and ripe fruit.
Not all fruits and vegetables are healthy for them; for example, grapes are perjudicial for their kidneys
The fruits they can eat are banana (of binding nature), melon, watermelon, pears, apples, raspberry, strawberry, kiwi, mango, and papaya. The vegetables they can eat are: boiled carrot, boiled peas, mashed potato, turnip, radish, cucumber and alfalfa.

Each hedgehog has different likes and dislikes. For example, my hedgehog loves chicken ham, Starking (red delicious) apples, strawberries and baked sweet potato, but she hates banana and potato.
They also have different reactions when you offer them these foods. Usually, the first time they taste something, or every time they taste something tasty, they start to annoint themselves and trully you might think they are having a fit and convulsions, but in fact it is usual in them and nobody knows why they do it, some think it is as if they wanted to mask their smell or something... Fortunatelly, they don't do this when they eat insects!!
On the contrary, when they do not like something, they may just ignore it, move their nose aside from the food you are holding or lift their plate with their nose and turn it upside down (yes, my hedgehog does this when you give her banana, she is very bad tempered, sometimes.)

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