Vandal accused of killing Hedgehog by spray painting it to look like Sonic

Vandals apparently spray-painted a hedgehog to look like Sonic, and a farmer found him dying, of all places, behind a police station.

That grim irony landed in the year Sonic turned 35, a birthday Sega marked with peculiar tributes, the oddest of which was a $21,000 figure with synthetic “Sonic DNA” sealed inside its chest.

Sega, at least, kept its experiments to resin, whereas the vandals in Wakefield did not.

Hedgehog painted to look like Sonic died from chemical burns

The farmer spotted the adult male on Tuesday, October 27, in a field that backs directly onto Wakefield Police Station, and by around 4pm the hedgehog had reached Castleford Hedgehog Rescue.

The vandals held the can so close to his back that the chemicals burned through several layers of skin, and many of his spines simply dropped out.

Beth Campsill, who runs the charity, gave him as much pain relief as she could, but he kept screaming until, as she told Yorkshire Live, “he effectively screamed himself to death” the next morning.

She blamed an infection from the burns alongside possible poisoning from the paint, and she also found flystrike, where flies lay eggs in open wounds so the maggots can burrow into the flesh.

Campsill called it the worst case of spray paint cruelty she had ever dealt with, and she didn’t hold back on whoever was responsible, telling Yorkshire Live, “I don’t know how anyone could be so cruel to an animal.”

West Yorkshire has been here before, too, because in July a hedgehog named Honey was found covered in blue and yellow paint in a garden in Yeadon, Leeds, and police arrested four males aged 44, 21, 17 and 15 on suspicion of causing unnecessary suffering to a protected animal.

None of it helps a species already listed as “vulnerable” on Britain’s red list of mammals, where numbers have dropped by up to 30% in towns and 50% in the countryside since 2000.

No arrests have been reported in the Wakefield case, and although Campsill planned to take it to police, she wasn’t sure, given where he turned up, that anyone would be held responsible.

Sonic, who never asked to become anyone’s stencil, returns to the big screen when Sonic the Hedgehog 4 hits cinemas on March 19, 2027.