David Munk: Death to the Hedgehogs!

I'm a vegetarian. I don't wear leather shoes, belts or coats. I usher wasps out of my flat rather than swat them with my copy of Bean-Eater Monthly. I used to listen to the Levellers and remember once arguing I would rather sacrifice a member of my family - my sister - than allow an innocent rabbit into the clutches of a cosmetic scientist. In short, I'm probably an averagely committed veggie. But now I'm pretty certain the hedgehogs have got to die.

Some bizarre malaise has afflicted a sector of our population - a malaise so frustrating that when I first heard it made me want to eat my radio. A collective waywardness of mind has skewed all sense of proportion, leading people to raise a reported £75,000 to relocate hedgehogs from islands off the coast of Scotland to the mainland.

Why? Well, here are the crazy facts if you don't already know them. Four hedgehogs were introduced to the Western Isles in 1974 to control garden slugs. They are now a ground force of 5,000. Scottish Natural Heritage says they are a major problem, eating the eggs of rare wading birds. Some colonies of birds have been reduced by up to 60%. So the conservation agency wants a cull. Get rid of the hedgehog - plenty more where they came from, population up to 5 million on the mainland - and save the indigenous birds.

A veritable no-brainer, you would have thought: start with North Uist where the problem is in its infancy, cull the entire population of 200 as hibernation ends. After all, fencing off the hogs doesn't work. Nor does contraception.

But SNH has run into human problems of campaigning groups and knee-jerk do-gooders. A coalition of the silly has formed between charities and advocates of animal rights: normally my kinda people. They want a non-lethal solution and have despatched 11 volunteers - and even two trained nurses - to the islands. The idea is to pay £5 for every hedgehog found by a local and fly or boat them to safe havens.

SNH claims the relocation would be cruel. The hedgehogs would die painful deaths. The isles' hogs are free from fleas and have no immunity to disease carried by mainland bugs. Also, any hedgehogs re-released into the wild would probably starve or cause other resident hogs a similar fate: SNH claims studies show hog populations are determined by the availability of food. Most crucially - and this is most bizarre - campaigners are removing hogs from islands where the cull is not even being carried out this year. The SNH says by the time the cull gets to those islands, animals rescued would have died of old age anyway. So what we have, then, is tens of thousands of pounds being spent to save an abundant animal that is a serious threat to a habitat and would itself have died a natural death if it had been left alone in the first place.

Now the campaigners deny many of the SNH's claims, saying they would be able to look after the hogs very well. And I guess there would be an excuse for a smidgen of outrage if those nasty agency folk were using clubs to slaughter the unfortunate hogs. But no, they are given the finest drugs available to man and then humanely disposed - a blessing rarely afforded humans.

Let's imagine these campaigners - and more importantly donors - explaining this all to a mother in Malawi. "I was going to give you £10 which would keep your family from starvation for a couple of weeks but instead I put it towards flying a hedgehog club class to the Maldives for a bit of sun."

She would be right to be angry. They do have warped priorities. On their planet every hedgehog has a name. There's Harry, Harriet and Humphrey Hedgehog. Anthropomorphic alliterations to make us dewey-eyed and reach into our pockets.

Maybe it's a guilt thing. Here we are doing horrible things to cute animals, so let's throw some money at them. But the truth is if they aren't cute forget it. Cows and chickens are fair game to be put through the mincer. Indeed, take the case of the mink. Somewhere in the UK in November 2001, 200 mink were culled because they were eating rare birds' eggs and crofters' animals. Where were these mink culled? North Uist, home of Henrietta and Harold Hedgehog.

Poor old Mindy the Mink and her cubs just weren't cute enough to be given a ticket off their island.

Nor I guess are the 40 million Africans the World Food Programme worries are about to starve to death, nor were the 4.7 million who died in the hell of the Congo. And there is no ticket out for Iraq as war continues to devour lives and livelihoods.

So should we really worry about the hedgehog of the Western Isles? Well, I'm not worried. I know my priorities, and they should die.