From Alec Vans
Back in the 1960s my wife and I were travelling along a country road at night when we both saw a hedgehog run across the road in front of us, stop for about a second, then resume its dash across the road to the safety of the verge (Forum, 14 January, and Letters, 4 February). We were both startled by this behaviour – which was certainly as untypical then as it would be now.
Our reaction as you would expect was to consider that hedgehog as behaving in a new way for hedgehogs, and we naturally speculated then as we would now that with a bit of luck for the hedgehog species this trait might get incorporated into the hedgehog’s genes as a valuable adaptation.
It is galling and not very polite to be told in New Scientist 25 years later that there is “not a shred of evidence” for our observation.
