Hi Baldwin Hedgehog
No doubt you already know my thoughts about treats. They are a peculiarly human thing and hedgehogs don’t need them. The supplementary food we give them is treat enough for them. But if you really felt you wanted to give them something different you could, for instance, if you normally feed wet cat food, offer them some cat/kitten biscuits.
The problem is that, whether you like it or not, the hogs will visit many gardens in a night and others may also be offering what they consider to be sensible amounts of ‘treats’ of mealworms, etc. So (bearing in mind that some hogs are addicted to mealworms) the hogs could be going around from one garden to another and picking out all the mealworms. So they could actually be eating fairly large amounts of them in a night, without you even knowing about it.
Not only are mealworms not that nutritious (so that filling up on them means that they might not eat so much of their natural food, which is likely to be better for them), but they also have the imbalance of calcium and phosphorous, which no doubt you have heard about.
Having too much phosphorous can cause calcium to be leached from the bones. Hoglets are particularly at risk with their growing bones and they can grow in a deformed fashion as a result. In addition there have been reports that hoglets become so addicted to mealworms that they won’t eat anything else – when they desperately need to eat some good nutritious food if they have any chance of recovering.
Hopefully a bit of explanation of the problems will put you in a better position to make a decision for youself. Even if you may have read me saying similar numerous times before!
