Wild Disciplines and Multispecies Erotics: On the Power of Wanting Like a Hedgehog Champion

Abstract

ABSTRACT While the erotic can be a vital source of change and sustenance for environmental action, how do we ensure we want well? Particularly, how do we do so when our care is directed towards a member of another species? Radically in decline in the UK, hedgehogs are increasingly attended to by thousands of largely urban-based volunteer conservationists nationwide. While these ‘hedgehog champions’ are typically captivated by the charms of hedgehogs, they also emphasise the importance of hedgehogs remaining ‘wild’, a quality they define as the need for hedgehogs to come and go freely from urban gardens. In this article, I focus on the use of this quiet, backyard ‘wildness’ to redirect potentially possessive modes of interspecies want. Through practicing disciplines of non-capture, hedgehog champions often come to delight in and care for the wider environments that support hedgehog lives. Through attending to hedgehogs in these expansive wild ways, however, it becomes clear that learning to love hedgehogs responsively in isolation is insufficient to make the changes hedgehogs need. Urban hedgehog conservation requires renewed attention to the power of the erotic as it plays out – and is fenced off – between humans.