I share my bathroom with an African Pygmy hedgehog. His name is Atticus, and when he’s rolled into a ball he looks like a fat, tan sea-urchin. He’s a simple pet who enjoys a very limited range of activities, none of which involve human interaction.

Atticus’s time is exclusively spent eating, sleeping, and exercising; you’d think by his schedule he was training for the Olympics.

In the wild, hedgehogs will travel many miles a night searching for food. Confined to a cage, Atticus must make do with running on his wheel for several hours a night.

If you disturb him during this time, say by turning on the bathroom light, he will freeze. His wheel, however, will continue to slowly rock back and forth, complete with frozen hedgehog, for a few amusing moments.

Things I Learned About Hedgehogs While Writing This:

1. Hedgehogs love to climbs things- but they have terrible eyesight and will fall to their deaths if given the opportunity. This is why Atticus’s only cage platform can only be a few inches off the ground. Stupid, suicidal, or maybe just avidly adventurous? Who knows!

2. When a hedgehog likes the smell of something, say, a tasty meal worm, they will produce a thick, delicious spittle-foam which they then smear all over their spines.

This process of covering themselves in a rich bacterial goo is called “anointing” and serves to hide their hedgey scent and make their spines more infectious should he have to poke someone. It’s essentially hedgehog biological weapon building.

3. Hedgehogs are apparently notorious for getting their heads stuck in things like toilet paper tubes and paper cups.  It’s such a serious problem that it prompted McDonalds in 2006 to change their McFlurry cups so they were easier for dumb hedgehogs to escape.

Atticus eats mostly cat food, and occasionally a meal worm or two.

He’s prone to dirty feet- a condition referred to as “Poopy Boots” by hedgehog fanatics. Julia will sometimes bathe Atticus in the bathroom sink, gently scrubbing away his poopy boots, which Atticus must then carefully reconstruct.

For all his quirks, Atticus puts up with the curious humans who share his bathroom, and is much more interesting than back of a shampoo bottle or the two-year-old edition of National Geographic, and that’s saying something.