Man's shock after putting out cardboard box fire then finding the body of a charred hedgehog inside that had been burnt alive

SWITZERLAND -- A man has spoken of his disgust at finding the charred body of a hedgehog that had been burned alive in its cardboard box nest.

Swiss man Peter Specker discovered the badly burned hedgehog after using a bottle of mineral water to put out a fire on a cardboard box burning at the side of the road in the Swiss city of Zurich.

Specker, 58, had been on his way to work in his allotment when he spotted the smouldering cardboard box that was almost completely burnt, sitting on a manhole cover.

Worried that the fire might spread, he had used a bottle of mineral water which he had in his rucksack to put out the blaze, and only then did he realise that there was a partially burnt corpse of a hedgehog inside the box

He said: ‘The poor animal had been killed by the fire and smoke, how sick someone must be to get rid of an animal in this way.’

He called police, who took photographs of the scene and then took the badly burnt box and the body of the dead hedgehog away to see if they could work out how it came to be at the side of the road and who might have started the fire.

Specker added: ‘I have had my allotment here since 1981 and I've never seen anything like this. It was an incredibly cruel thing to do.

'The hedgehog had a sort of a nest in the box made out of old newspapers and that meant it had burnt quickly.’

(Daily Mail - Feb 26, 2014)