Dr. Anne Berger

Hedgehogs are one of the most beloved animals we have here in Europe, but the populations of the hedgehogs, they decline really drastically.

We also have investigated what are the reasons for this, and a kind of new threat for the hedgehogs are the so-called

mooring robots, and that's why we had some research on this problem with the dilemma with the hedgehogs and the mooring robots.

Yeah, the problem with the mowing robots is what you already said, that they often work without any observation from humans, so automatically.

They are also allowed to work at night.

The hedgehogs are nocturnal animals, then they also curl into balls.

And they are threatened and they don't run away.

And that's really a problem for the hedgehogs because at night when they meet such mobile robots at the meadow, then yeah, it really comes to deadly accidents.

I collected in Germany, I collected for 16 months in different hedgehog stations and we reported 370 accidents with injured hedgehogs.

The heavy thing was that

About the half of these hedgehogs died from these injuries.

And also more than 60% of these hedgehogs was the fact that the wound was older than 12 hours, sometimes also older than days.

Yeah, the wound.

The accident was more than 12 hours ago.

So that means that these hedgehogs, yes, suffered for a long time.

So one solution is quite easy for the companies who produce mowing robots and they can program the mowing robot like that they can only work at day hours.

It's quite easy and I think maybe every company can program their devices like this but

This seems to need some society pressure for the companies that they really do this.

This would be one solution that we can avoid most of these accidents.

So another solution would be a ban of nighttime use of these mowing robots in the society so that the user of these mowing robots is not allowed to use it at night.