Originally published at Ignatian Spirituality
Not long after my wife and I got married, we bought a pet hedgehog. Our plan had been in the works since our undergraduate days; no one was more ready to own a real-life hedgehog than we were. We’d done the research, bought the gear, and owned a totally normal amount of hedgehog décor: salt and pepper shakers, bath towels, Christmas ornaments, oven mitts, candlesticks—the usual stuff.
But something we were not prepared for was how sensitive hedgehogs are to the cold. When the outside temperature drops into the 50s, hedgehogs—or the domesticated variety that we owned—go into hibernation.
Sounds like a perfectly normal thing, right? In Baltimore in the winter in our first apartment, a perfect 72 degrees was elusive. Hibernation sounded pretty good.
But here’s the thing: while our little critter did all the things she believed necessary for a long, cozy slumber, what she was accomplishing in reality was the total shuttering of her internal organs.
For our hedgehog, hibernation meant death. And so for us, a cozy, crisp evening quickly became an exercise in jerry-rigging a variety of heating apparatuses.
That seems like an oversight in the general hedgehog design, no? I often wondered—and frankly, still
