Sadness and the noir of urban hedgehog conservation

Hedgehogs are a difficult animal to love in contemporary urban worlds. Hogs struggle to thrive in cities splintered by traffic and impermeable fencing, and frequently find even apparently innocuous litter and infrastructure to be hazardous. While public conservation campaigns are often upbeat, privately, many hedgehog champions express sadness about the possibility of really helping hedgehogs. With champions’ lifeways contributing to the trouble hogs are in, even as they try to help, questions of guilt shift from the friendly village murder mystery to something like the noir detective narrative in which, as argued by both Deborah Bird Rose and Timothy Morton, the detective finds themselves implicated in the very crime they are investigating. In this paper, following fieldwork in Bristol, UK, and surrounds, I wonder about the possible value of sadness—a feeling often discouraged from public conservation campaigns—to challenge the fatalism of the noir.