THE WHEEL

Watching me distrustfully

Hedgehogs, like all mammals, need and love to play. So, we decided to buy a special wheel for small mammals and big rodents. 
We thought it was a great idea, since she was becoming too fat because she didn't do any exercise at all.  She was supposed to enjoy running around the dining room and inside the wheel, but whenever we left her on the floor, she stayed on a corner in her typical "stone-camouflage mode".
What happened with the wheel? At the beginning, she totally ignored it and whenever we tried to put her inside, she went out immediately (most probably she was suspicious of the new-plastic smell). proressively, she started to use it as a shelter. The problem was we weren't able to make her come out afterwards and she ended up coiling as a ball and she was so fat that we couldn't take her out through the holes!

Trying to hide under the wheel

When the summer came, we decided to leave her outside the terrarium all night with her  food and water supplies and a squeaky sound together with one similar to running stones in the middle of the night made us learn she had started to use the wheel properly. In the morning, we saw in disgust, that our little lady had her paws all dirty with her own poo, there were also some bits on her quills, the wheel was all dirty with her pee and poo and the floor around the wheel was full of small paw-prints. 
In conclusion, when she runs in the wheel she thinks she's leaving back behind. It was funny to follow the paw-prints and see where and what she had been doing all night. It was not so much fun to clean all that and even less when I found out the stains on the floor wouldn't come out by just mopping the floor.