“How can you worry about animals when human beings are suffering?” I wish I had a penny for every time that has been said to me, because by now I would be a millionaire. I know that I shall be hearing it again in a few weeks’ time as we approach hedgehog awareness week, which seeks to heighten national consciousness of this rapidly diminishing band of charming little creatures.
“Hedgehogs indeed! What about Syria?” will probably top the list of responses. It always surprises me when Christians turn up their noses at animal welfare, as if somehow it’s a distraction from God’s work when actually it is an integral part of it. He sees the meanest sparrow fall unnoticed in the street.
Our duty is to relieve suffering whenever and wherever we find it, and the more helpless the sufferer the greater the duty. I am a patron both of the Leprosy Mission and of a donkey sanctuary in Israel and both are important to me. Equally important? No, but still important.
Once we start refusing help on grounds of comparative importance we open a can of worms. So we shouldn’t set up charities for tinnitus sufferers because, unlike cancer patients, they won’t die from it? Why research the common cold when people can get heart attacks? Why worry about backache when some have broken spines? It can also get sinister if doctors, when allocating resources, give preference to a normal child over one that has Down’s syndrome.
Obviously, there will be occasions when priorities do matter. If a man and his dog have both been run over, of course we call the ambulance first and the vet second – but we still call the vet.
Such logic does not apply only to physical suffering. I am often challenged about the use of the term “persecution” when applied to Christians in this country who find themselves disciplined for saying “God bless” at work, or are demoted with a savage pay cut for expressing opposition to gay marriage on a private Facebook site, or are forbidden to wear symbols of their faith or prosecuted for refusing to put a slogan on a cake. How, demand incredulous interviewers, can I call this persecution when in other parts of the world people are being imprisoned or beheaded just for believing in Christ?
Under that sort of daft logic the man with a piece of shrapnel in his leg has no right to call himself wounded, because somebody else has lost a limb in the same battle. The chap laid up with nasty flu cannot call himself ill, because somebody else at work has had a stroke. Suffering and persecution are made manifest in many different degrees but they are still suffering and persecution.
There is a host of charities and everybody has his or her own reasons for supporting them: the reason they flourish is that there is such a diversity of support instead of a rigid ranking of worthiness. So, yes, I care about Syria and I care about hedgehogs. Visiting a sick colleague in hospital does not stop me passing tissues to one who has just sneezed at his desk. Turning away from suffering without helping is quite wrong, whatever the degree of need, and the way we treat animals says a lot about us as human beings. So for a few seconds let me return to hedgehogs.
When I was a child there were some 36 million of them roaming about the woods and gardens of Britain. When I was 50 there were a mere two million. Today there are fewer than a million, so if I live a normal lifespan I may see the day when hedgehogs are as rare as the giant panda or even as extinct as the dodo and, as usual, man will have been the cause.
Road vehicles don’t help but even more important is the density of dwellings, each fenced off from its neighbour. Hedgehogs need to roam far and wide in search of food and therefore need to wander through gardens, so a hole in your fence or your garden wall will help hugely and will divert absolutely nothing from whatever you are sending to Syria.
Meanwhile the British Hedgehog Preservation Society rescues and cares for hedgehogs, which can then be released back into the wild to breed and keep the species going. You do not have to take a sentimental view of the world to find that worth doing.
I have a collection box for the Leprosy Mission in my kitchen, a picture of a hedgehog with the slogan “Please Do Not Squash Me” on the rear screen of my car and a sack of clothes for Syria in my spare room. Last week I addressed a meeting in aid of donkeys in the Holy Land. I know God blesses all those causes, not just some of them.
Ann Widdecombe is a novelist, broadcaster and former prisons minister
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