Should rehabilitated hedgehogs be released in winter? A comparison of survival, nest use and weight change in wild and rescued animals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The rehabilitation of sick or injured wildlife and their subsequent release back into the wild is considered important, not only for the welfare of the individual animal but also for the conservation and management of endangered and threatened wildlife. The European hedgehog Erinaceus europaeus has declined by 25% in Britain over the last decade and is the most common mammal admitted to wildlife rehabilitation centres in Britain, with a large proportion of individuals admitted to gain body weight overwinter prior to release in the spring. Consequently, many thousands of hedgehogs are housed overwinter which incurs significant costs for rehabilitation centres, and has potentially animal welfare issues, such as, stress in captivity, reintroduction stress, increased mortality risk and impaired or altered behaviour. To determine if releasing rehabilitated hedgehogs during autumn and winter had an effect on their survival, body weight or nesting behaviour, we compared these factors between 34 rehabilitated hedgehogs with 23 wild hedgehogs across five sites in England over four different winters. Overwinter survival was high for both wild and rehabilitated hedgehogs, with a significant decrease in survival across both groups when hedgehogs became active post hibernation in spring. We found no differences in the survival rates up to 150 days post release, in weight change, or nest use between wild- and winter-released rehabilitated hedgehogs. Our results suggest that under the correct conditions, rehabilitated hedgehogs can be released successfully during winter, therefore avoiding or reducing time in captivity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".