I've had Quinn for over three months and since she was the first hedgehog I had ever handled, I had nothing to compare her behaviour to. I did feel that she was extremely shy. She hisses and balls every time I come near her, but now will relax when she realizes its me. I sing her the song from Winnie the Pooh before I go near her, and that kind of keeps her from freaking out too much. After the song, I can reach under her and scoop her up and she will ball up a little, but I can still feel her feet on my hands.
One trick I have found that really works is to put my cocoa butter lotion on my hands first and she loves it, so when I put my hands by her, she will start licking like crazy and forget to hiss and stab!
The only thing I can think of to describe her behaviour is that she is like a feral kitten. I work with her every day and I can tell she trusts me as much as she is able to trust anyone, and that has really made all the work worth it. And there are those time that I get to see her face come out from under her visor of quills and get to feel her soft belly that make up for all the times she hops up and impales me.
She will sleep on my lap if I have her baby blanket over her and she will even relax and let me stroke her quills, as long as I stay away from her head. She is very relaxed at those times and it gives me hope that she will continue to become tamer over time.
I find that bath time is an extremely important time for bonding. Like others have said, she sees me as the one that will rescue her from the water, even though she seems to enjoy her bath. When I put my hand down into the water, she will climb into my hand without hesitation. Her first bath was the first time that I had ever seen her with all her quills lying down flat!
I don't know why she is so skittish. I do feel that the breeder did not take the necessary time to socialize her. She was very slow to answer my emails, and since I had to travel a long way to pick her up, I wasn't able to see her temperament until the day that I picked her up, so I expected her to be stressed out. If I had it to do again, I would not have purchased a hedgehog I could not meet a number of times before purchasing.
I wouldn't ever give Quinn up now, but I would have loved to have a hedgie that was more social. I don't really want the responsibility of more than one hedgehog, so I am resigned to working with Quinn as long as she lives, and I have hope that she will mellow out over time. I feel hopeful when I read that some hedgies take up to a year to tame. But I did think I was buying a "domesticated" pet, not a wild hog that had been found under a hedge somewhere and brought home a bucket.
I don't want to stress Quinn out if she doesn't want to be handled. I took her to work last week to introduce her to a girl who is considering getting a hedgehog. She was okay when the girl was looking at her, as long as she wasn't getting too close, but later when I showed her to a guy, she completely freaked out and became one of those hissing and popping balls that tell you that you need to wrap her up in her blanket and put her away!
Anyway, I do like these posts about "normal" behaviour of hedgies. It makes me feel like I'm not the only one with a "difficult" hedgehog. I told the breeder that I was more interested in personality than appearance and asked her what she thought of my hedgehogs' personality. She told me that she was an "explorer". I do think she misled me by not telling my that the hedgehog I was paying $150 for, was extremely shy. I was a little suspicious when I asked her for a photo of the baby since I had only seen one picture of her at about two weeks old.
It took her ages to get a photo to me, saying she was having problems uploading a photo, but I think it may have taken her that long to get a photo of the baby without her quills up. The one she finally got showed a very cute baby, but even in that photo, her visor was lowered.
I bought from a breeder instead of a pet store because I cared about things like breeding lines for health and personality, but if I had it to do again, I would most likely buy from a pet store so that I could at least see what kind of personality the hedgie had before I had accepted the awesome responsibility for raising a difficult one.