Sorry about bumping this old thread, I just found it while searching for info a few days ago when I was worried about Quinn's odd behavior, and I might have found a reason, so I figured I'd post here so HixVAC could see it.
A few days ago, Quinn pretty much went nuts, in a way similar to what's described in the original post. I had her on my knees, she was exploring as usual, when at some point she pretty much started bolting away from me, and struggling to get out of my hands when I'd catch her, to the point where I was forced to put her back in her cage because I was afraid she'd injure herself.
She then spent all evening and night bolting around her cage, rolling in her litter (ew), pushing all of her furniture around. While this might seem like usual hedgehog behavior, the extremeness of it compared to her usual behavior was still very odd. I was worried, but at the same time I didn't know if I should be. It felt odd to be worried that my hedgehog was over active, right?
I had much trouble sleeping that night, because I kept hearing her trash around, and had to go check on her once in a while. She flipped her waterbowl over twice (by pulling the fleece liner), so I ended up having to remove the bowl and putting a waterbottle up instead. When I got up for work she was still at it. Before I left for work I put her cage back in order (she would jump away from my hands instead of balling/popping). When I came home that night she had messed it all up again. Her cage was like a war zone, with all of it's content pushed in a heap in the middle of the cage, food strewn everywhere, and she was sleeping in a corner of the cage, directly on the plastic floor (since she had messed up the liner too), and started huffing when I got close, silly head had messed up her cage so much she had nowhere to hide!
I gave her a bath (she did roll around in her poop after all) that night and cleaned up her cage. She was still a bit hyperactive that evening, but she did not mess up her cage again. She went back to her usual behavior now.
I had seen her act strangely like that about a year ago, but it was a little less extreme and didn't worry me as much.
I was planning to just post my experience here, and see if other people had ideas about this kind of behavior, but before I did I visited a few threads, and found a link to
Hedgehog World. Funny coincidence, the front page has an article that appears to explain this exact situation!
Over the years, we've made a lot of observations about how the weather can influence hedgies. Most hedgehog owners have had the scary experience of attempted hibernation first-hand, or have seen hedgies splatted out when the weather is warm. What many hedgehog owners are not aware of is that hedgies can be significantly affected by changes in barometric pressure!
It's been my experience, and that of many hedgie owners I've talked to, that hedgies get more active when there is a gib weather front moving in. The incidence of "My hedgie is going psycho and trashing its cage" emails that I get rises significantly and I see it in my own hedgies too. It also seems to affect hedgies' breeding. When weather patterns are amok, it has been my experience, and that of other breeders with whom I've spoken, that hedgie mamas are more likely to abandon or destroy litters when there are rapid changes in barometric pressure. This seems to be a greater factor than time or season of the year. I'm not sure how to put together a statistical analysis of this phenomenon, but the observational data is pretty persuasive!
This could have a lot of sense! On monday we had a lot of rain, and through the week the temperature oscillated over and under the freezing point. Today we got a good little snow storm. The freakout happenned between tuesday and wednesday. It doesn't look like I can see the barometric pressure of past days on my weather site, but I wouldn't be surprised there were unusual changes, considering the week we had.
I'm glad Quinn got back to normal, and I had figured it wasn't something to be too worried about since it only lasted a day, but I'm pretty glad I found a possible explanation for it.
Could this be what happenned to your hog, HixVAC?
