Hi Hedgie Lover
Don’t be too worried. Very often male hedghogs change their nesting places quite often anyway. You definitely shouldn’t interfere – they will sort things out between themselves.
At this time of year hogs will often go into boxes for short naps between snacking, so it’s possible that Huffy wasn’t actually resident, in the box.
The biffing looks quite rough, but it doesn’t do them any harm. They have all those spines to cushion them. It seems likely that Huffy is a male. You are right males don’t normally biff the females. I would not normally rely on an isolated behaviour, but if you see several different episodes of typical male behaviour you can be fairly sure. Then if Huffy conveniently scratches in front of a camera, if he is a male he will have a ‘blob’ or larger, roughly mid-abdomen.
They probably weren’t fighting about the home, as such. It’s more that a more dominant male is likely to biff a less dominant one if it comes into his space. i.e. the space around him wherever he happens to be. It just happened to be the hog house on that occasion.
