Photo: JanPietruszka/Depositphotos
Who can resist a baby animal in distress? Certainly not a well-intentioned English woman, who discovered an abandoned baby hedgehog on a sidewalk one evening. Worried for its safety, this unnamed woman took the tiny critter home and nursed it through the night, before taking it to an animal hospital in the morning. Once she got to the hospital, a startling discovery was made—the hedgehog wasn’t a hedgehog at all. Instead, it was a stray pom pom that would normally be found sitting atop a woolen beanie.
The concerned woman had carefully brought the wayward pom pom in its own newspaper-lined box, complete with a small food bowl. As funny as this situation is in hindsight, one can only hope she felt more relief than embarrassment when the veterinary staff at the Lower Moss Wood Nature Reserve & Wildlife Hospital informed her of her mistake. Luckily, any laughs to be had would be in good fun, and she’d surely join in.
The news story has since made its way to Reddit, with a community of users chiming in. Everyone seems to be supportive of the woman’s decision to take care of what she believed was a poor baby animal, no matter how misplaced her concern may have been. One user wrote, “This is hilarious for obvious reasons, but it’s a lovely story that made me smile. The news is so often full of unhappy stories, particularly over the last few years. That this lady’s immediate response was one of kindness and looking out for what she thought was a living thing was heartwarming to me.”
Others noted the similarities between the hedgehog-imposter to the tribble, a fictional fuzzball creature from Star Trek, with one comment saying, “They’re saying it’s a bobble but it’s obviously a tribble… And if we run out of tribbles (pfft, yeah right) we can fool the klingons with bobbles.” And funnily enough, there are actually several crafters who make hedgehog pom poms, making this case of mistaken identity all the more understandable.
An English woman recently made national headlines when she brought an abandoned baby hedgehog to an animal hospital…
https://t.co/kTpcWNVxJY#HedgehogRescue #PomPomMixUp #WildlifeConfusion #Superpet pic.twitter.com/4KpvDh0aRT
— Superpet Limited (@Superpetltd) March 30, 2024
She soon found out that the “baby hedgehog” was actually just a fluffy pom pom.
While this case of mistaken identity is undoubtedly a funny one, people online have been praising the woman for doing the right thing, even if it turned out to be a bit of fuzz.
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h/t: [Daily Mail]
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