Cristy Lee has a hard time convincing her friends about the endearing qualities of her hedgehog, Siu-Dak, which means 'Pokey' in Chinese. Every time she introduces her nine-month old spiny mammal to them, he curls up into a ball.
'When I first got Siu-Dak, he wasn't that scared,' Lee says. 'But since he's got older, he's become more scared of sounds, and if a stranger goes near him, he'll curl up into a ball, so he's very challenging to play with [when friends are around]. But whenever he does get scared, Siu-Dak only stays in a ball for a minute or two, and then becomes normal.'
Lee adopted her hedgehog in September last year, after one of her friends showed her a picture. 'Hedgehogs are so different from cats and dogs,' says the pet owner, who also owns a hamster, a dog, two cats, a tortoise and fish. 'They are about the size of your hand and have very soft fur, like cats and dogs. I let it walk around [outside its cage], and up my arms and around my neck.'
Veterinarian Gillian Hung, at Happy Pets Veterinary Centre in Tai Hang, started seeing hedgehogs in 2010. As these small mammals breed quickly, Hung has noticed more people keeping them as pets.
'They have a gestation period of about a month-and-a-half, not as quick as hamsters, but still fast,' Hung says. 'So that's why, apart from being cute, it's easy to breed them. The government doesn't give out licences to sell them in pet shops, but you can adopt them from people.'
Another reason why these creatures breed so quickly is their owners think they have two same-sex hedgehogs when they actually have a male and a female together in the same cage.