Welcome to this webinar. We're going to be discussing today African pygmy hedgehogs. These are really lovely, cute little pets.
And we're going to be considering their background, how to keep them, feed them, and then their diagnosis and treatment are the most common things that you might see in veterinary practise. My name's Emma Keeble. I work at Edinburgh Vets.
I'm one of the clinicians there who deal mainly with exotic pets. But I also lecture, finally a vet students, and we have clinical rotations with those students as well. So I'm hoping by the end of this lecture, you may have the information that you need should you encounter this species in your general practise.
So African pygmy hedgehogs are really becoming much more common as exotic pets. We see them regularly, obviously in, in our clinic, probably 2 or 3 a week on average. But I think this has really been driven by the sort of, interest in owning a more sort of exotic, different animal.
And this is often driven also by media and popular culture. And we've got a lot of Animals now that have their own sort of, you know, Instagram accounts, such as Lionel the Hedgehog here, who's got over, well, thousands of Instagram followers. I think we've also seen, generally, in practise, haven't we, an increase in pet ownership in lockdown.
And I, I would, extend that also to the species that we're seeing more being kept. And, and with that, there is a higher risk of these animals passing on diseases, perhaps through owners not really investigating prior to owning them, the common problems that might encounter such as salmonellosis in hedgehogs is quite a big thing. So zoonotic risk, obviously, is quite a consideration and something we as vets can easily advise our clients about.
The other thing that I worry about, you know, with the interest in in a different sort of new novel species is that we perhaps don't have the information we need to sort of manage these animals appropriately in captivity. There hasn't been a lot of work perhaps done on their diet and captivity, and also how best to keep them, to optimise their husbandry and welfare. And because of this, we do often with exotic pets, unfortunately, see husband and and nutritional diseases coming and we'll talk about these as we work our way through the webinar.
So I think it's really helpful to know with any new sort of interesting animal species, you really do need to know a little bit about their background. This can then sort of inform us in terms of what we should be advising our clients for their husbandry and for their diet. And I think a lot of people often think that these little critters are actually rodents, but they're not.
They belong to the order insectiva. So they're insectivores. And as their name, suggests, they do originate from Africa.
So thinking about that, their typical habitat is sort of open grassland with scrub, and savannah, and they are a burrowing animals, so they do live in burrows. One thing that I think is very relevant as pets is that they're nocturnal. And therefore, they, they're more likely to be active and out at nighttime, which can be a problem when owners really want to wake them up and have handling sessions during the day.
Often they don't appreciate that. They are very territorial, so we usually do keep them singly. So they would have quite a large territory, and they would, fight any other animals coming into that area.
And I think it's also important to think about the average weight in the wild because in captivity, as with a lot of species, we do see them, putting on more weight than perhaps is actually a good thing for them. So we've got some average weights there for female and male animals. Another really key thing that we need to know as vets is that torpor can occur, if these animals are kept too cold.
They don't actually hibernate, but they will go into a torpid state if they're kept cold. And this could be a situation where you might be encountered with what appears to be a collapsed animal with a very slow heart rate. And actually, it's just been kept too cold and they haven't provided a heat source.
And this is a, a possible common scenario. I thought it would also be very helpful to have a little bit of background biological data. We often get asked by our students, you know, what would be the normal respiratory?
What, what would be the normal heart rate for this animal? So having like a, a sort of, idea of that is really helpful and key. And I think what's very interesting, looking at this slide, is that temperature is naturally quite low.
So don't be worried. I mean, if you've got a 36 °C temperature in a rabbit, you would think it was critically ill. But in hedgehogs, they do run a lower normal body temperature, 36.1 to 37.2.
So that's quite important, I think, for us to to appreciate. So we've got their average sort of respiratory rate, their average heart rate. There's nothing too unusual or overly exciting.
They're quite, quite standard, I guess, for a small mammal. Another thing to think about is their age. Now, in captivity, they can live 5 to 7 years.
I think it's very, very rare to see a 5 year old animal. And it's much more common, sort of 3 or 4 is, is quite an aged individual, I feel in captivity. But there is a potential, obviously to live longer.
Another thing that we do need to know as vets is that they have these unique behaviours that we need to take into account. You know, this isn't something abnormal that that's happening and and we can advise owners, therefore, that, you know, don't worry, this is something that hedgehogs do. So as a defence mechanism, we all know that hedgehogs will curl up into a ball, and they have the whole of the dorsum covered in spines.
There's a muscular ring that enables them, which contracts and enables them to roll up in a ball as a defence mechanism. And this is called the orbicularis muscle. Another thing that they will do that's normal, but can often actually give our final year vet students quite a shock when they first encounter these animals is when they're a bit upset, they can vocalise and they hiss, and they huff, and they actually Jump.
And this is something that as, as you're going towards the animal can be a little bit perturbing if you've never encountered this species before, and it can make you jump as well. So just be aware of that normal behaviour. And we've got some videos to show you in a minute, of, of what that entails.
Another thing that it will do is they will self-anoint, and this is quite common. And this is a thing where they salivate over their own spines. And we've got a picture there at the bottom of your screen that's showing this behaviour.
What I often find is when we're inducing these animals in an induction chamber for anaesthesia, this is the, the behaviour that can occur. And we don't know fully why they do this. There hasn't really been enough work done to, to try and understand this behaviour.
But it often is in response to an abnormal smell, a strange smell, or a strange taste. So if you're giving medications, sometimes they'll start anointing. And we do think they have a very well developed sense of smell.
So just again, to be aware of these behaviours and and that these can occur and they're normal in this species. So how do we house these animals? We can give really good advice hopefully to our owners, .
Looking at the top picture there with that Bavarian, these are the classic, style enclosures that we see for African pygmy hedgehogs. My worry with these is that they are actually quite small. They don't allow the animal very much space to move around.
So bigger the better, really. But classically, they are kept in these open fronted, sort of sliding doors, openings, with a sort of box type, vivarian. One thing that you'll notice there is they've got an exercise wheel and a litter tray.
Those are two important, things to provide, certainly to give extra exercise, because obesity is actually very, very common in this species in captivity. And we do want to provide an area where they can hide and they can sleep and feel safe. Normally these animals are housed singly, because in the wild they're so solitary, but if they're going to be bred, you can keep obviously a male and female together.
Sometimes also a pair of the same sex that have been brought up together can live happily without any fighting. I mentioned that they are very, very active, so the bigger the cage, the better. The other thing is, hedgehogs are amazing climbers and can climb out of structures.
So you really do have to make it very secure, because otherwise, you will get your animal escaping. So certainly, if you've got the front sliding thevarian using a lock on those doors would be a good idea. Providing a substrate that can actually absorb materials such as urine and also is odor-free and dust free is quite important.
Most people keep them on shredded newspaper, or hay and wood shavings, but there are now some really good diets, sorry, substrates that are really absorbent but very dust free. And these are available commercially for small mammals, you know, and you can, you can purchase these instead, and they may be a good alternative. One important thing, as I mentioned, they can exhibit torpor.
So we do need to provide extra heat. And this is something that I, I think is really, really key. And we, we still do find animals that are not getting this in their natural, in their environment at home.
So I think making sure that That's one of the key things I would always ask clients is, do you have a heat mat? If you've got a ceramic bulb, this obviously needs to be proofed and covered. And we also do need to provide some artificial lighting so that this animal has a natural photo period.
So we're thinking really between 10 and 14 hours of light per day. So this can be provided, you can provide UV strip light or you can make sure that they're exposed to natural light. You know, whether it's within a room that's, that's, got a really big open window so they can actually appreciate the day length.
You do need to pride the heat source, and I would always, always recommend owners have a thermostat attached to that as well as a thermometer, so you can accurately tell what the temperature is in that tank. The thermostat is very important because it will cut out if the heat mat overheats and that therefore reduces the risk of fire, you know, and obviously that would be a bit catastrophic. So very, very important to emphasise that to owners.
A litter trays, something that they can be trained to use. And these can be, put in one corner of the tank, and then you can use litter. They don't tend to ingest it.
So any sort of litter that you would use, perhaps in a, a cat litter tray, we tend to sort of recommend the paper-based ones, because obviously, if they were ingested, that might pass through a little bit easier. And another thing to mention is they really do actually enjoy swimming. So some people will give these animals little baths, that they can enjoy.
Very shallow, because obviously, this is quite a new thing. Perhaps they won't, won't enjoy it, but just once a week, perhaps to, to give them access to a shallow bath and see how they enjoy. With that.
And then on warmer days, it might be possible to get them outside. But again, we talked about how easily they will escape and that they will climb. They can reach really high.
They stand up on their hind legs and pull themselves out of an enclosure. So just make sure it's as escape proof as possible if they are going outside. Moving on then to their diet, and again, this is very key because, you know, if we don't feed an appropriate diet or we overfeed, there are going to become problems that we will then have to deal with them as the the vet involved.
So thinking about what they would eat in the wild, we mentioned the mainly insectivorous, so they will take insects, worms, slugs, snails, these sorts of items often foraged and eaten in the wild. In captivity, we do have commercial hedgehog foods. So there are dry foods available that are insect-based.
And I think I would probably always push owners or, you know, encourage owners, to feed these types of drits. But you will often find that, dry sort of cat food is also being fed. And an average 2 to 4 teaspoons per day.
So you could do those in divided, amounts if you wanted to feed twice a day. On top of that, you might want to consider some sort of wet food. The dry food is really good because obviously it's, it's crunchy and it encourages, good sort of dental health.
So, I think the main part of the diet should be the dry food. But considering a small amount of moist cat or dog food on top of that, you can also feed cooked eggs or a low fat cottage cheese as well. It could be any of those items, but just one teaspoon of those in addition.
And then they do also like a small amount of fruit and vegetables and I've listed the sort of common things that people feed there, as well. But again, I wouldn't overly Give this, you know, just a small teaspoon full, just to sort of vary the diet. And these actually can be sort of scatter fed to encourage foraging behaviour.
We can also give occasional live insect food treats. And again, these should just be in very small amounts. Things like the mealworms and the wax worms.
These are high fat items, and they can. So we'll just redo this slide, Dawn. I'm sorry about that.
No problem Emma. Do you want to just go from the top of this slide? Yeah, I'll wait for the dog to stop barking that the front door went, sorry.
Don't worry. Just start again when you're ready, stop. S I'm so sorry.
No, don't honestly don't worry, it happens all the time. OK. Come here.
Right, I think we're OK. OK, let's start again. So we can also give.
I'll stop it, Dawn sorry. OK, I'm going, I'm OK, I'm going to restart now, OK. We can also give occasional treats, and things like mealworms, wax worms, crickets.
These are invertebrates that can be scatter fed as well. And that also, as I mentioned before, can can encourage foraging behaviour and increase their activity levels. But these really should just be treat items because the mealworms and wax worms in are high fat and what we don't want, as you can see from the picture here is to encourage obesity.
But they are really nice and they they can provide environmental enrichment for this animal. You can also get dried mealworms. Again, if people owners are not very keen on on keeping the live invertebrates at home.
I would definitely recommend, and particularly for very young animals that we add a nutritional, a vitamin mineral supplement to that diet once or twice a week. And there are several available. One that we tend to recommend is by Vetarc, and it's called Nutrib.
And that has, calcium, D3, and, and vitamins as well. And I've mentioned beware obesity, we can see from this picture, they, they tend to be very, very much love these animals as as most pets are, and sometimes killed a little bit with kindness by overfeeding and particularly these sort of high fat items that I've mentioned. So just being aware of that, and it's something that we as vets can become quite tactical and careful approaching these subjects, but very important, often these animals that are very obese can't properly roll up.
And you can see from this picture here, you get rolls of fat on the underside as well. Just thinking about breeding, this is something that perhaps is more specialist, but I think it's quite helpful for us to have that background information as well. They can breed all year round.
Sexual maturity is quite young, about 8 weeks old. And it's thought that ovulation is, is induced in this species. A little bit like our guinea pig patients, we do need to be breeding from the females relatively early on, because otherwise, you can get fusion of the pubic synthesis.
So, Encouraging at any time from 6 months to 2 years, but above 2 years, you probably wouldn't recommend breeding from that animal if they haven't bred previously. We have a sort of standard gestation period, 34 to 37 days, but it's important to note they can exhibit delayed implantation. So sometimes this can extend up to 40 days.
And they really are very cute. You can see from the picture there, the little hoglets, as they're known as, very, very endearing. Something that I often get asked by students, you know, how on earth do they give birth to these little spiny animals?
Well, what happens is, that they're born, obviously old tricious, so they really can't fend for themselves. Eyes are closed, but they're naked as well. They, the spines don't actually expose until a few hours.
After birth. So this obviously helps in the, the passage of the, the young through, and out. So, you will see that they're totally naked once, once they initially emerge.
And they actually become darker after a couple of days with the spine. So these are white at first. One thing that can happen if the mother is stressed or if the, male is kept with the female while she's giving birth and cannibalism can occur, or if you move these animals, you know, and change, change the environment, then they can with stress, eat their own young.
So just avoiding any sort of change their circumstances and, and any overhandling is really important. The young are weaned about 5 to 6 weeks of age, and then we usually separate them from mom about 8 weeks old. And it is really interesting.
When I was, looking into this, this webinar, there have been some false pregnancies reported. I've not actually seen this, but again, something that's worth thinking about if you have got an animal that's supposedly pregnant and, you know, nothing's happening, it could be a false pregnancy. So I thought I would just give you this information about reproductive data for the African pygmy hedgehog, just to sort of try and to get that into one.
Slide for you. We've sort of discussed most of this in the previous slide. But, one thing that, you know, it, it's quite important to think about is their Easter cycle, 3 to 17 days that I haven't mentioned before.
And the fact we usually do breed from them, probably, you know, anytime from 6 months on was, usually about a year maybe. And, and otherwise, their pubic synthesis can fuse. So that's just really a recap, of what we've been talking about.
In terms of sexing them, this is actually a European hedgehog photo of a male and a female. You see, they've got a slightly darker coat. But it was really just to show you it's exactly the same in the African pygmy hedgehog.
The male has a larger anogenital distance. So, the male. As you're looking at that screen is on the left hand side next to the, the text, and the female is on the right.
The female's got that shorter and a gentle distance. And you can actually see in the male, even though we've got the animal, with the hind legs are being, gently suspended in the front front legs are down on the table at the bottom of the picture. You can see on the male that you've got a couple of little, almost testicular bulges there.
So they can be evident. In males, again, a really important thing to note, they have very large intraabdominal accessory sex glands, and these, are very evident if you're doing an exploratory laparotomy or going into the abdominal cavity, you will encounter these and and they can be, they can look quite strange, a little bit like with the guinea pigs, it's a very similar sort of scenario. So just be aware of that.
That's normal. I think one thing that's very important is we must wear gloves when we're handing these animals because there is a high risk of zoonotic infection. And we'll come to talk about this, a little bit later in the webinar.
But we always wear gloves with these animals. So I explained to owners, they're usually fine because they don't tend to wear gloves. Just explain to them that we need to also, we might be seeing multiple animals, so it's really good practise, from infection control point of view.
When we're handling these, they often huff and they don't like to be handled. Usually it's during the daytime, and you think about it, they should be fast asleep for them because being nocturnal, this is not normal. But what we can do is place them on the table.
Usually I put them on a little towel and then just gently stroke the animal from the head to the tail. Rocking them sideways as well can also encourage them just to place their feet down. But they will make these sudden huffing jumping movements.
And as I say, it can be quite a shock to you. It can cause you to jump back when it happens. It always makes me laugh cause it, you know, students often don't realise that it's gonna happen, and, they get a bit of a surprise when it huffs.
So again, this is a European hedgehog. I'm just showing you that handling technique. What we're doing once we've got the animal, sitting on our, our exam table, and we're stroking it and rocking it gently, as we rock it, we're just gently, bringing Our hands backwards and trying to get hold of those hind limbs so we can just gently grasp them.
And then the reflex of the animal is to place its forelimbs down to support itself. And you can have a really quick look on the underside of the animal. Now, obviously, if you had an animal that came in That was balling up and one of its hind leg was sticking right out, and they weren't able to bring it into the ball.
That would be quite a worry that there was a fracture and you wouldn't want to do this to that animal. So any sort of history of a lameness or pain in the hind legs, don't, don't do this. But this will give you a very brief, quick, limited examination without an anaesthetic being needed.
We can also use a padded wood and spatula to open the mouth. I've got some photos of these later, I think, so I can show you those. But that's something that some individuals will tolerate.
So this is just to show you, a little friend who came in just a few weeks ago. I've got my towel on the table. I've got my gloves on.
You see how this animal's now huffing, it's jumping. This can make giving injections quite difficult because they suddenly jump. He was very much not wanting to be held or to be examined underneath.
And sometimes, you actually have to say to the owner, we can't do this, I'm afraid. They're just not wanting to be, to be checked. But you can see, we can have a good look at the dorsum there.
I'm just gently stroking, trying to tilt, but there's no way I'm gonna get the hind legs out from this animal. But what we can do, if we angle around, is have a look and look. We can actually look at, see if there's any nasal discharge.
We can get a look at the eyes as well. We might be able to see if there's any swellings ventrally or any faecal staining, or, or blood staining around the perineum. So there are, there are some things that we can tell from that fairly limited clinical exam.
If we want to do a more thorough exam, if we're really worried about dental disease or a problem in the mouth, then we almost certainly will have to give that animal a brief gas anaesthetic to do so. In terms of clinical procedures, we can take bloods from these animals. So they have a, quite a, a clear cephalic vein.
We also have a femoral vein and a lateral sepenous vein that we can use. In thin animals, we could potentially use the jugular. But what we often find is that we can't actually see that it's quite a deep vein and it's quite buried, especially if you've got an animal of sort of average weight.
What we might in that situation, do is use the cranial vena cava. This has to be under a general anaesthetic, and it's a similar procedure for other small mammals. But you have got to be a little bit careful in hedgehogs because the heart is quite forward in the thoracic cavity.
So there's a, a slight increase in the The risk of puncturing the heart itself. So I've got a video to show you how we do that, and how careful we are as we place our needles. So I can, I can show you that in just a few moments.
We also do want to figure out how much we can actually take safely. This is something that I think people often forget about. 1% of total body weight can be safely taken.
And as I mentioned, we do have to anaesthetize the animal for this procedure. So this is just showing you with the animal on its back, it's heads at the bottom of the picture, and we've got the forelimb extended. We can see the sort of just purply coloration of the cephalic vein running along that forearm.
They're pretty tiny veins. So we are using probably a 25 gauge needle, 1 mil syringe. Possibly an insulin syringe might be better.
But we have to also got to be careful because you can get clots quite quickly. So I, I usually use a 25 gauge needle and one mil syringe not attached. You've got lateral sofina showing there.
So the animal's head is at the top of the picture, and we're gently pulling out that hind limb. This animal's anaesthetized. And we can see that purply bluish vein running over the back of the leg there.
It can be very beautiful and you can see it and then these do move out the way as you go in to take the blood samples. They can be a little bit mobile. This is the cranial vena cava.
The animal is anaesthetized. We have a mask over its face and he's on his back. And we are taking, well, actually, in this picture, we're euthanizing this animal.
So when I first started doing this technique, I would actually, Use it for euthanasias so that I was able to practise it safely. And then obviously, once you start taking blood samples from this animal and recovering it, that's, that's better that you've, you've actually got used to how this technique is performed. So I've got a video just to show you here, which I will play.
So this animal's anaesthetized. We've just had a feel for that area, gone in very slowly, carefully, not too far in. We're watching the needle hub there.
We've got a little blob of blood and we're now aspirating back. We can't hold off on this vein, so we just pull out slowly. So this, the, the area that you're looking at, you're feeling the trachea, which is midline, and then you're going into the notch to the side, lateral to the trachea, at the thoracic inlet.
There's a little sort of triangular notch that you'll be able to palpate. And what we're doing, hope you can see from there is the, the angle of the syringe and a needle is about a 45 degree angle, and we're angling it towards the contralateral hind limb. So it's an angle crossways to the opposite hind limb.
And that's our cranial vena cava blood sampling technique. For clinical procedures, subcutaneous injections can be in the flank. They can be anywhere over the dorsum.
As I mentioned, though, you have got to be careful because the animal might huff and jump, and that can affect your, your injection technique. So I usually just gently pull up a few of those little spines with one hand, try and swab the area if I can, and then inject. And in intramuscular injections are a little bit easier perhaps because if the animal balls up, it's the ring of muscle around the edge of that ball on the underside that you're aiming for.
For clinical procedures, we can place in osseous catheters. With these, though, it can make it difficult for the animal to roll up and curl up, because the limb can be left sticking out, and they sometimes become dislodged. What we perhaps prefer to do, particularly if an animal's going to be anaesthetized and then perhaps we're performing an operation or a procedure, we would place an intravenous cannula in the cephalic or lateraltravenous vein.
And this is something that is possible in a collapsed animal. But obviously those veins will be collapsed as well, so it can make the procedure a little trickier. So this is just to show us, something that we would do, as I say, if we were performing surgery and, and, you know, needed IV access during that procedure.
For oral administration, sometimes it's best to actually give these directly to the animals. Some individuals may be amenable enough to do this, but often owners find this difficult. So what we can also try and do is hide that medication in a small food item.
Perhaps a treat. But the problem is these guys are nocturnal. So you do need to ensure that the owner observes that drug being eaten.
So perhaps once a day, first thing in the in the evening, that's the item they get given to be fed before they get their main meal. We want the owner to directly observe that they have eaten that medication. If you get an animal coming in that's collapsed, we really do need to provide an external heat source for these and usually 27 to 29 degrees temperatures is the ideal range that I would keep a sick African pygmy hedgehog at.
And we have little incubators at the the hospital that we would use for this and we can set the temperature accurately. If you don't have that, then, you know, you can use snuggle safes and and Microwavable heat pads, no problem. But again, just be careful if it's very, very debilitated, not to overheat it because it might not have the energy to move away from that heat source.
When it comes to diagnostic imaging, usually for any of these things, we do need a general anaesthetics. If you're considering radiography or ultrasonography, then you really will have to anaesthetize the animal to perform that. You can see this little guy is about to go into our CT scanner.
We have it, maintained on a face mask, but we, we do also intubate these individuals. We've got an IV cannula attached, which we can then inject contrast. And we've got the animal anaesthetized and appropriately position for this.
In I would say with radiography is the spines can affect the detail. So what I usually do if I'm taking a lateral view is just gently pull the spines doors so that they are. A little bit more taunt and then not sort of dropping back over the abdominal contents.
So that's given you a sort of brief idea of our common diagnostics in this animal. So let's move on to common problems that we might see in veterinary practise. Excuse me, sorry.
Dawn, we can do that one again if need be. So, one of the common things that you might see is ocular disease. I have seen quite a few of these individuals with corneal ulcers, and we would treat those as for other animals.
Another thing that can commonly happen is that we can get proctosis of the eye because they have quite a shallow orbit, this is a relatively common thing if there's been some trauma. But also, if you've got any inflammation around the orbit, or in very obese individuals, you might have a large retrobulb fat pad, or you could have a pathological retrobulbar mass, or abscess that was, was causing it. And it is possible to nucleate these animals.
And we have got a couple of our patients that are one-eyed and, and have recovered well from that procedure and seem to cope well. Another thing that you will commonly see as these get older is cataracts. These are usually age-related.
But we do think that hedgehogs can cope quite well with blindness, particularly if they're kept in similar surroundings and things aren't moved around, because they do rely a lot on their smell and hearing for locating items. When we're looking at ear disease, we do see a lot of these individuals with quite thick and scabby ears, and obviously, if this is the case, they could start scratching, you can get otitis externa and potentially otitis media. The sort of things that would commonly cause this sort of thickening and scaling of the skin would be fungal infections or mite infections.
And the mites that they particularly commonly get are caporinia, but they can also get not just noodectys as well. On top of that, we might have secondary bacterial infections, we might have yeast infections. And I guess if you had a very poor diet, this could be nutritional based.
So what we need to do if we see an animal. With a dermatitis around the ears is we, we really need to do some further diagnostics. So we're going to basically take some hair samples, skin scrapes, and some samples, perhaps of bacterial and fungal culture.
We might also want to take some samples from actually, the external ear canal itself. So for that, we would almost certainly have to anaesthetize the animal to get that sample. And we can treat these as we would with other, other, mammals.
We can use ear cleaners and we can use topical treatments. Some owners will be able to do this, some won't. It depends very, very much on the individual.
If we're thinking about treatment for mites, then we can use quite a few different products for this. There has been a paper that described using oral floralleema, once off 15 milligrammes per kilogramme. Or we can use a topical fipronil spray.
Be careful with this because it has an alcohol vehicle, and you can get the animal cooling too quickly if you overuse the spray. I would also make sure it's very well ventilated because obviously hedgehogs curl up. And what we don't want is for the animal to inhale excessive fumes from that.
So just doing it in a well ventilated area, making sure it's not hiding under a towel when afterwards, is quite important and keeping it warm as well. So we've got some other things we can use topical Amitraz, systemic injections of ivermectin or topical ivermectin or sallemectin. And we also have other products that have been used as a topical once-off dose too.
So there's a lot of information now available for us to treat these animals appropriately for any ear mites that we might see. We'll come on to talk about the ringworm and how we might treat that, just later on. So moving on to skin disease, this is really, really common and I think as vets, we're often don't diagnose it as much as perhaps we should.
I get a lot of these little individuals coming in that are quite erythematous and the owner says, oh, that's always been the case. So you often See this sort of reddening an erythema on the ventral side of the animal. And then when you quiz further, there's a history of spine loss and that, you know, this can be quite excessive.
Now, losing one or two spines sporadically is, is a normal process. But if you're getting excessive spine loss and scaling and crusting, then immediately start thinking this could actually be an ect parasite problem. And then some people do say, look, we should be screening all our pet hedgehogs for this.
It is something that can be subclinical as well. And if the animal is stressed or debilitated or the systemic disease, it can become an issue. The sort of things we'll see I've kind of mentioned is the skin reddening.
Sometimes they will be itchy, but most often not, you'll see scaling and quill loss when you place them on your consulting room table, you might get that sort of scaling dropping off the animal. If it's really, really severe, then, you know, certainly animals have died from this. But hopefully, in the pet animal situation, this wouldn't get to that point.
You'd get the owner hopefully bringing it into you before that. We're going to diagnose this very much on clinical signs, but also we're wanting to take our samples to see if we can find these mites. I think if you don't find them, I, and you've got clinical signs, I probably would still treat because I think as I mentioned, you can have subclinical infestation.
And I think if the suspicion, this could be an issue, it's probably best to treat and ivermectin is the most commonly used product. Usually I would go for a subcutaneous injection and I would give that every 10 to 14 days for 3 treatments. I've got a little video to show you of these mites because I think they're really quite cool.
So this was using a magnifying, der dermoscope that we have. And we've got illumination as well. So you can see these little guys feeding on that, caratinous debris around the base of the quill shafts.
And they really are quite a lot of them there. I think within this, we could also see individuals mating as well. So they're very prolific, and these infestations do very rapidly, get worse.
Concurrently, we often see fungal infections as well. I've listed all the types of fungal infection that African pygmy hedgehogs can have. So this is quite common to have the two acting together, and they have very similar clinical signs, although fungal disease is often not pruritic.
What we do need to do in those situations is take our samples, and we use little Domatify test media, that's the abbreviation DTM there, where we can inoculate the Agar and leave it on the side and and basically read it very quickly in house. So that's something that you could perhaps invest in. They're not too expensive if you are seeing hedgehogs, but you can also send them off to to your lab for cultures as well.
We want to consider treating, treatment is very similar as it is for other species. We can use topical, systemic antifungals, but we do also need to consider any in contacts, and also the environmental contamination that can occur. So we want to be washing any soft beddings and cleaning out that enclosure, very carefully.
One thing to note, I've got this picture at the top. We have a child there stroking an albino African pygmy hedgehog without any gloves. So this is a zoonotic condition.
And we really, really do want to be wearing gloves when we're handling these animals because they could be carriers for ringworm. So moving on, still, within the skin, we do also see a lot of skin neoplasms, and these are common as the animals get older. Anything really from 2 to 3 years onwards.
And I've listed the type of tumours that you might encounter in these animals. Really, diagnosis and treatment is, as for other animals. So we can take fine needle aspirates or biopsies, or we can surgically surgically excise and send off for histology.
But often these are quite nasty, and will recur. So depending obviously on your tumour type, we always need to be advising the owner of the possibility that this is quite a poor prognosis. So I'm now moving on to oral and dental disease, which is actually very common, unfortunately, in this species.
Again, I think because we're feeding quite soft diets, we do see a lot of periodontal disease, gingivitis and plaque buildup, which then can lead to a tooth root infection and abscesses and osteomyelitis of the jaw. Often on top of that, we do see near oral neoplasms and squamous cell carcinoma is quite a common one that we would see. Now, I mentioned earlier in handling that some individuals will gently let you have a look with a little spatula.
Usually what I do with the wooden spatula actually place a little bit of couflex soft bandaging over the end just so that it's less abrasive to the animal. And here, we're just cupping the animal on its back and just encouraging that mouth to open. Obviously, we're not going to get a full exam of the mouth here, but we can at least assess whether we think there might be dental disease or halitosis.
We might have a a a quick glimpse and and see some sort of mass as well. But the classic clinical signs are a reduction in appetite. But sometimes owners will actually see the animal salivating and pouring at the mouth and have noticed the smell.
But, but often it is just a general, this animal isn't eating as well, and it's losing weight, which obviously could be many other causes, but one of the key differentials would be dental disease in an older animal. We're going to manage this really the same as we would for other species. So we're going to anaesthetize the animal, have a really good look in the mouth and and perform some radiography, or CT or whatever imaging we feel is the right thing, depending on the case.
We might also want to take some biopsies or find aspirates if there's a mass there. And the picture at the bottom here, is actually showing you an animal that had very severe dental disease and developed a mandibular abscess. So we've got quite a swollen lower jaw there as well.
So treatment really of actual dental disease is the same as for other species. We can perform dental cleaning in these animals, and we can give them advice, owners advice about avoiding hard food, sorry, avoiding soft foods and encouraging hard foods for dental wear. Cardiac disease is also something that we will see again.
Perhaps less commonly than the dental disease and skin disease, but certainly from about 3 years onwards, we often get animals in that are losing weight, that perhaps are more lethargic, and owners report a difficulty in breathing. They might be dyspic and they've noticed the sides are moving more than normal. Obviously, if it progresses, we might also get secondary issues with pulmonary edoema and ascites.
And obviously in severe cases, it could lead to the demise of the animal. If we're concerned about this, then we probably do want to do some further imaging. We might not easily be able to auscultate this animal on clinical exam, if it's a huffy individual who's making a lot of noise and jumping lots, it might be difficult to hear the heart properly.
So if we're worried about this as a possible cause we need to plan our anaesthesia and our imaging carefully, limit the time of the animals anaesthetized for have everything on stand and ready. But we may see this enlargement of the heart and obviously secondary signs as well on radiography. We don't know exactly what causes this in in African pygmy hedgehogs.
It's been suggested that there could be genetic, dispositions or that perhaps dietary causes could lead to cardiomyopathies, but we don't fully know. And we're going to work this animal up as we would really a dog or cat, but obviously, we're going to have to anaesthetize it to do that. So we can perform X-rays and we can do an echocardiogram.
This individual here is having an ultrasound. We're, we're having a look at that heart to really evaluate further how it's working. Treatment is really similar to other species, but generally, the prognosis tends to be pretty poor.
Long term, they don't do well. Something that can present very similarly to cardiomyopathy is bronchial pneumonia, and this is something we do quite commonly see, unfortunately. We do wonder whether this is secondary to poor environmental ventilation, perhaps poor hygiene or dusty bedding.
This could potentially predispose an animal to a sort of bacterial infection and a bronch pneumonia. So just think about the husbandry factors as well. I have also seen an individual that aspirated.
It wasn't doing very well and I tried to ringe feed it and, and it had actually aspirated that material. So just think about your, your clinical history when you see these cases. We also want to be thinking, is this definitely bacteria?
We could have something more sinister such as pulmonary neoplasia, and we mentioned cardiac disease as well. In wild European hedgehogs in the UK we see lung worm. But if these pet hedgehogs have been housed indoors and have not been fed, slugs or snails or earthworms from the garden, then this would be very, very unlikely in pet hedgehogs.
If they have been fed, those sorts of items from the garden, there is the potential there for them to have picked up this infection. And certainly, you know, that's something I guess you would need to consider. We might see some nasal discharge, might see sneezing.
We might see some increased abdominal effort in our breathing. And when we auscultate, we might hear crackles and wheezes as well if we've got lung disease. Diagnosis are very similar as for other animals.
So we're gonna be taking our X-rays, thinking about taking a blood sample to rule out any underlying causes. And we can perform, bronchial alveolar lavages, and look at cytology from these individuals and culture. Another thing that we use, and we're very lucky, we do have a a CT scanner on site.
CT imaging of the respiratory tract is, is pretty amazing. So that's something you could consider if you're wanting perhaps a more accurate diagnosis. And there are many owners who are very, very invested in pets and will, will opt for that.
So treating these animals can be interesting because obviously, we want to be careful, you know, how we're going to actually administer these antibiotics. We're going to inject, we're going to give them orally, if they're required. If we nebulize, it might be that they don't like the the sort of smell of that, that nebulized item and they start anointing.
So we need to have a bit of a chat and a discussion with the owner about how best we're going to get all these types of treatments into this animal. If the animals are collapsed and we have them in hospital, we can give supportive care with subcutaneous fluid therapy, and we might also want to give assisted feeding as well. Moving on to gastrointestinal patic disease, I would say this is perhaps more common in in perhaps younger animals, and we do see enteritis.
I had one actually just a couple of weeks ago that we have cultured salmonella from. So an animal that presented this is actually a picture of it with very green staining of the back end and a history of diarrhoea. So one of your top differentials for enteritis would be salmonellosis.
And it's less common to get a parasitic cause in pet animals, as I mentioned before, really unless they've been fed earthworms or snails or slugs from the garden. We might see these animals becoming dehydrated because they're losing fluid via the diarrhoea. And we really do want to investigate this further and particularly because of the risk of salmonella and this being a zoonotic disease.
It's also possible to have resistant strains of salmonella. So it is, it's important to, to do that culture. One other thing that we do need to mention is that, carriers of salmon is very common in pet hedgehogs, and this has been well documented and reported that zoonotic infection can occur in people from their pet hedgehogs.
So I've got a picture at the top of the screen there of a normal dropping just so that you know what's normal for this animal. If you're seeing sort of green muoid, perhaps bloody faeces, and this is really quite a concern. Now, I just wanted, this is a slide that maybe, you, you can, use as a sort of basis for your client advice if you do have a salmonella case in a, in a pet hedgehog.
This was a, a list of sort of things that I would recommend owners, do or don't do, depending obviously. What it is listed. But it's quite a useful guide, I think that you can give to your clients.
Most of it makes general sense. You know, we need to improve our hygiene by washing carefully our hands before and after the animal and trying to avoid any contact with that animal with our sort of kitchen or food preparation areas. One thing that owners often will do is cus is sort of cuddle their their hedgehogs and carry them in their clothing and have them up to their faces.
And that that's the sort of You know, it's difficult to talk through that and say, look, you can't actually do this to your pet, but I think it's very important if you do get a salmon that are positive to try and discuss, you know, trying to be less of hands on with that animal. We also mentioned Really just disposing of, of, items that have been cleaned out in the enclosure, carefully bagging these and and disposing of them in the waste, and just being careful, perhaps also people who might be at higher risk, such as young children, or immunosuppressed people around these animals that are positive. So that's the sort of general, list of advice that I give to clients that's hopefully quite helpful for you if you do ever get a case, diagnosed.
Just moving on with the gastrointestinalpatic disease, we do sometimes see animals eating things like carpet, and they can get foreign bodies. They don't tend to vomit hedgehogs, so we usually get them presented claps and lethargic, and you might feel an area in the abdomen that's painful or enlarged. But if we have got any sort of distention of the abdomen, we might want to consider taking radiographs and seeing if we can see anything obvious on those.
Another thing that we do sometimes get is animals with esophageal or gastric ulceration. It can be quite difficult to diagnose, but classic you tend to see them. Salivating a lot, perhaps, bringing up a sort of frothy mucoid substance.
And sometimes there's blood in it as well. So if you have a suspicion of that, then obviously, you might also get weight loss and reduced appetite associated with it. You'd be you'd be, treating them as you would in other mammal species.
So there are some other differentials for diarrhoea that I've listed there as well. It doesn't always have to be salmonellosis, but obviously, that's your top differential on the list. We must also consider neoplasia.
We might have changes in diet. We might have access to toxins. And liver disease is actually relatively common, unfortunately in these species, really due to the fact they're often overweight and they're fed excessively.
So we get fat deposition within the liver. And then if they stop eating, we can get hepatic lipidosis. So just being aware of all those extra things, there's a lot of things that can occur in these little animals.
And I think hopefully that's just given you a sort of good overview of the most common gastrointestinal conditions that we might see. We do see reproductive disease. This is actually, I think, quite common, particularly in female animals.
Again, I'd had a little animal just last week, that was actually referred because we thought that it had cystitis. There was blood in the urine, but this was actually coming from the vulvas. So vular haemorrhage is, something that you need to be very worried about if you see it.
It's most likely that this is coming from the uterus, and this could be highly likely to be due to a neoplastic condition. We do also see pyometras and metritises as well, but, you know, we, we generally are concerned if we see that sort of blood from the vulva. And, and often these animals are anaemic as well, if it's a chronic blood loss.
Other things that we can see, obviously, you know, just the usual reproductive female issues have all been diagnosed and described in, in pet hedgehogs. In males, sometimes you can get a positis, and this can be due to, substrate entrapment. And that picture on the lower aspect there just shows a real swelling around that area, and it is something that you may see.
I mentioned urinary tract disease. Hedgehogs can get cystitis. They can get uriasis.
Renal disease is also something that we do see usually about 2 ages on 2 years onwards of age. Clinical signs. Often are non-specific.
So you get these 2 to 3 year old animals that have reduced appetite and a little bit of weight loss. So this is a really, really common clinical presentation. And as we've gone through these different causes, you can see that there are quite a few things that could be causing those, those, fairly generic clinical signs.
Other things that might lead us to think about the urinary tract are straining to urinate and perhaps reduced volume of urine as well. So you might, if you quiz your own a little bit deeper, you might find that they actually do mention, yes, actually, we've seen them sitting in that, that litter tray and not really producing anything. They seem to spend quite a long time in there.
When we're going to try and diagnose, and we can get a free catch urine sample. Hopefully, if we've got a litter trained animal, we can clean that litter tray out, and get a fairly, clean urine sample so that we can perform some initial urinalysis. If we're going to consider taking radiographs or ultrasounding this animal, then we would need to anaesthetize it for that.
And if that's the case, we might consider an ultrasound guided cystocentesis to get a urine sample. Treatment is really as for other animals, but do be aware that owners often confuse sort of a bloody urine, and they'd call it cystitis when actually it is reproductive disease and all the two could be present concurrently as well. Moving on to musculoskeletal problems, again, as animals live and become older, then the possibility for osteoarthritis, disc disease, and spondylosis of the spine increases.
And these have been reported in pet hedgehogs. I've also seen issues associated with nail overgrowth and Nail bed infections, cause they've caught on the carpet. We can get, poo dermatitis in, in aged animals, perhaps or obese animals as well.
So there's a lot of different things that can cause lameness, and we would really investigate and work these up as we would for other, other species. I think one thing that's very important to mention is that neurological disease seems to be relatively common in this species. There are many different causes, but the the main and most common one that I think we diagnose is this wobbly hedgehog syndrome.
And I hope you've all sort of heard about that. It's something that has been described quite a bit in this particular species. But looking at that side, do you consider all the other possible causes of this neurological issue.
This animal could just be cold, and that's why it's not really walking properly. But we could also have our usual other differentials going on. If we have a head tilt or circling, that could be more associated with an infection in the inner or middle ear.
We could also have an issue in an animal that was perhaps postpartum, of hypercalcemia. In older animals, I've mentioned about osteoarthritis, but also disc disease is perhaps more common, and this can present with a progressive atax in lameness. And that can again be very similar to the wobbly hedgehog syndrome.
So, you know, ataxia is a quite a non-specific sign. It is commonly seen. You need to be thinking about all these other possible causes.
And an animal that's systemically unwell may often be a little bit attaxic. But what we also do see commonly is this demyelinating paralysis or wobbly hedgehog syndrome. And this is an idiopathic neurodegenerative disease.
In the USA, they have written many papers on this, and they tend to see quite high incidence from two years onwards. We do definitely see this also in the UK. Initially you can see a sort of mild ataxia, and they sort of stumble or trip, but gradually these signs progress and worsen over time.
And, and classically, these animals don't live long. And we were looking at about, you know, 1.5 to 2 years post diagnosis.
So I've got a video just to show you here. I thought this would be of interest. This is quite an aged animal.
It has got cataracts, so it's blind. It's holding its head slightly to tilt as well. But, you're looking at that thinking, is that normal sort of scenting behaviour or is this animal just slightly abnormal in the way it's holding its head?
And I think, you know, once it started to actually move, you could see that it had got neurological signs. So it can be very sort of mild. We've got this slight tremor that we're noting there.
And as I say, the head's just slightly tilted as well. So differentials I mentioned for demyelinating paralysis, introvertible disc disease, we could have a brain tumour, we could have underlying systemic disease such as hepatic encephalopathy. Now, unfortunately, we're not gonna necessarily be able to make a definitive diagnosis until perhaps a postmortem sample.
So it is usually a presumptive diagnosis based on clinical signs and ruling out all the other differentials. If you, Do send an individual off for postmortem, then classically on histology, they see these vacuoles that are developed in the white matter. And so, this is, this is our diagnosis, unfortunately, only at PM.
We don't know what is the main cause, but there does seem to be a a familial tendency, and we're really only able to support this animal. It's likely to progress, and it may cause difficulty in eating. So assisted feeding may be one of those things that you can help with.
So I've got a more classic video to show you here that's sort of got perhaps, you know, more obvious ataxia. This animal is very thin as well. So we can't definitively say this is, wobbly hedgehog syndrome, because there could be underlying systemic disease.
So I would normally be wanting to anaesthetize this animal, take a full, blood, a blood sample for full blood work, and We have the, the luxury of having CT, so you could either do radiography or CT. Certainly CT imaging would give you, or a rule out for differentials such as intervertebral disc disease, osteoarthritis, spondylosis as well. And you may possibly also pick up a brain tumour, on a CT scan if it's, if it's large, and you're able to do contrast as well.
So you can just see from that picture how that animal was behaving very abnormally. Moving on, we do get skin neoplasms as well, and these are quite commonly seen in older animals. I think I've mentioned this earlier.
Most commonly, I think we do see these sort of, carcinomas, and, they often are quite infiltrative and, and do progress and get bigger in size quite quickly. I think that does make it difficult, obviously, You know, these animals are quite short-lived, and we need to have a conversation with the owner about the ethics and whether it's the right thing to, put this animal through any further sort of diagnostics or treatment. And that's very Much dependent on the individual animal and the owner themselves.
But really, really common for them to get neoplasms, any, any way, really over the age of 3 years old, but I have seen them certainly in younger animals than that as well. And they can, they're susceptible to a variety of different types of tumour affecting all body systems. And again, we get our fairly sort of non-specific signs of weight loss and lethargy as well.
With diagnosis, we're gonna try and do a sort of, you know, standard workup where we want to look at a blood sample to see if there's any abnormalities. We can perform imaging of these masses to see, you know, their extent and whether they're affecting any other areas. And if we're wanting to actually go ahead and make a firm diagnosis, then we probably will want to take a biopsy or a an ultrasound guided fine needle aspirate as well.
Treatment really is generally supportive in these animals. But there are individual sort of case reports talking about sort of surgical removal, chemotherapy and radiation therapy, with, with sort of very variable to success. And, and again, the ethics of whether we want to go down this route with this small, type of animal is, is, you know, something for, for discussion with owner, as well.
And it really depends on the tumour location type and extent. I did mention that we talked about nutritional disease just towards the end of of the webinar. Obesity is really, really common, as I mentioned.
They should be able to fully roll up and some of these individuals that are very overweight find that difficult. What we want to do if we do think this animal's over. A way to obviously put it onto a fairly strict diet.
We can reduce the high fat food items. We talked about the mealworms, and the waxworms being very high fat. We can increase the exercise, we can encourage increased foraging behaviour by scatter feeding.
But we want to do this slowly. If we do it too fast, we could induce hepatic lipiddosis. And we also want to be aware that You know, we can get nutritional deficiencies, particularly in young animals, if we're fed a sort of calcium deficient diet, for example, just invertebrate only.
So all these things are something we need to consider, and we talked about the diet in quite a lot of detail. So hopefully now you would be able to advise your owners as to what would be appropriate to feed these little animals. So just sort of finally finishing up with a little bit of anaesthesia because we talked a bit, really in all the sort of clinical cases, discussions about clinical cases, but most of the time we do have to actually anaesthetize these animals to get a really good clinical exam and to do offer the diagnostics.
So we do usually restrict how much they're eating just for a few hours beforehand, so that stomach isn't overly full. Certainly, so there's no food in the mouth as well. So I probably, probably wouldn't worry too much about an overnight one, but if the animal had fed that morning, I'd probably leave it a few hours before we anaesthetized it.
We can give premedications, we can buy injection, but most commonly with these little guys, we will do a chamber induction and we'll use we have sevofluorin in practise, which is less irritant to the mucous membranes, so we tend to opt for that. And what I often do is pre-oxygenate first, so the animal has that on board. And then we very, very slowly increase the percentage on, on the, of the sevoflurane or isoflurane.
And I mentioned about the self-anointing is something that can occur. So don't be worried if you see it. It's normal.
It's just a response to that smell of that anaesthetic gas. Most often if it's for a short procedure, we'd probably maintain, using an SST piece and a small face mask as in the picture at the top. We want to provide additional heat source as well, obviously, because these animals can cool very quickly.
But it is also possible to intubate. You can see in the picture below there. We've got one of these little soft silicon ET tubes, that's been passed and, and we can also place an intravenous catheter, which you saw the picture of earlier.
The bottom picture you can see how obese this animal is. It's really overweight. We've perhaps also got some ventral erythema, the type I was talking about that you can get with the, with the mite infestations.
We do want to give thermal and fluid support, so just the same as other small mammal species. And if we're actually removing any of the spine so that we're trying to operate and remove a mass, for example, try and limit the amount that you remove for surgery, just because obviously these then have to regrow and they could lead to the animal getting a bit cold if you remove an excessive amount. In terms of monitoring, we've got our usual, we've got pulse oximeters that we can place.
We've got one just clipped onto the hind foot there. We can use capnography and we can artificially ventilate as well. So that's all sort of fairly standard practise.
Finally, just to consider, I just wanted to sort of summarise, because I have mentioned, as we've talked through, the zoonotic potential that we have from these little guys. This is my sort of final slide just to really reiterate to you guys, zoonosis can occur. So we need to think about protecting ourselves and our staff, but also obviously giving appropriate advice to our clients.
So We always do wear gloves. We worry, obviously, that they could be carriers for salmonella and that could be subclinical infections. So washing hands afterwards is, again, also important.
We also talked about the possibility of fungal infections, and that's something that could pass to humans as well. And there are lots of reports in the literature of these, having been passed to humans from their pet hedgehogs. Less likely, but just to note, you can also, there is a potential for, for hedgehogs to pass on human herpes simplex virus, Cryptosporidium, Candida as well.
But these, these are less common. The main two would be the salmonellosis and the domatophytosis. So just, just really summarising that at the very end of this webinar so that we can be, you know, we can give good advice to our clients and also protect ourselves and our staff.
So I really do hope you've enjoyed the webinar. I've enjoyed, talking about these lovely little animals to you as well. They're very, very endearing.
They're, they're really great fun to own, but also, to, to treat and, and as I said, they have got these quite unique, clinical conditions that they can present with. So hopefully now, you can go out into practise well armed to be able to treat any little African pygmy hedgehogs that that are presented to you. Thank you very much for listening.
I hope you've enjoyed the webinar.
