Hedgehogs aren't my favorite animal, but that's because I don't have a favorite. I saw a new hedgehog pic, an that got me thinking, so I'm writing about it. I have a top ten or fifteen animals, and those aren't in a hierarchy. It's more like a big, floating 3D Venn diagram, with reasons I love one kind of animal overlapping & constantly shifting on multiple axes.

If you're having trouble picturing that, think of the ridiculous traps supervillians put in their lairs, the kind with many moving parts all rotating & interweaving. Like that.

(Yes, this is what it's like inside my brain all the time.)

Anyway. In alphabetical order right now my favorites include: alpaca, cats, dogs, dolphins, hedgehogs, horses, otters, parrots, snow leopards, and wombats.

Back in my pet-store managing days, I was a purveyer of hedgehogs. They were tinier than I expected, having conflated them in my imagination with porcupines.

Reader, they are utterly unlike porcupines. (Porcupines are huge, angry, stinky groundhogs who wear coats of barbed needles and demolish trees. In case you wondered.)

Why hedgehogs?

Hedgehogs are gentle little handful-sized critters who only get prickly if you rub them the wrong way, and their bellies are supersilky/velvety soft. (ours loved belly rubs) They roll into adorable balls when they feel threatened, but even then it takes work to stab yourself on a hedgehog.

I wasn't so sure about selling them, what with the "is it cruel to get animals from importers?' aspect, the potential for invasive species, etc, etc, but they made super-sweet pets in the hamster/guinea pig/rabbit line.

Not my kind of pet, to own, but absolutely a blast to play with. ANd since they are ridiculously photogenic, there are tons of pics of them all over the internet for me to enjoy.

I almost wrote a long post the latest kerfuffle in my social media, musing over why people who dislike a topic think their dislike gives them the right to trash-talk it in front of people who love it. (in this instance, romance & sex scenes)

But I wrote about hedgehogs instead and I regret nothing.

That's all until later.