French woman creates hedgehog rescue centre at home near Paris

Описание: (9 Mar 2026)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:

ASSOCIATED PRESS
Orsay, France - 6 March 2026
1. Various of Sara Stahl the rescue founder gently holding a hedgehog with gloves
2. SOUNDBITE (French) Sara Stahl, 'Les P'tits Kipik' rescue center founder:
"We are really becoming aware that there is a big problem with hedgehog populations in France and Europe, and this is due to several factors. On one hand, it's due to the fragmentation of their habitat, and obviously the roads, which cause a lot of damage to hedgehog populations. Many hedgehogs get run over because there are fences everywhere, walls everywhere, which prevent them from moving from one place to another to find food or a mate to reproduce. As a result, they are forced to use the roads where, unfortunately, many of them get run over. Pesticides are a very big problem because they kill the hedgehog's food, which includes insects and all the small creatures found in gardens and fields. As a result, the hedgehog can't find food and either starves or gets poisoned by the various pesticides. These are real sources of danger for all small nocturnal animals."
3. Various of hedgehogs
STORYLINE:
A French woman created a hedgehog rescue center at her home near Paris, where she has treated more than 1,000 hedgehogs in eight years.

It started in 2018 when Sara Stahl and her husband found two motherless baby hedgehogs in their garden in Orsay, a picturesque village in the Chevreuse valley near Paris.

Stahl realized there was only one rescue center for wild animals in the whole region of Paris and she decided to step in and created 'Les P'tits Kipik' which translates to "the little ones that sting", a rescue center in the garden of her house.

She created several enclosures and an actual care providing center with two machines for assisted breathing, weighting them, cleaning their enclosure and providing them with food every day.

The biggest danger of the little nocturnal strollers is humans, responsible of 91% of their deaths as only 9% are due to their natural predators: the badger, the great horned owl or the brown bear.

There are many ways that people can help the hedgehog populations, for example people with fences around their gardens should make a little hole to let them through so they don't end up on roads.

One of the more recent problems was the robot lawn mowers that people operate during night time, when hedgehogs are active, and of course the increasing use of pesticides.

By the end of 2024, the Western European Hedgehog has moved from 'Least Concern' to 'Near Threatened' on the IUCN Red List

AP video shot by Oleg Cetinic

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