Fairfax Hedgehogs

Hello to everyone here and thank you for visiting this site. My name is Lance, and my father and I are the humans behind Fairfax Hedgehogs. No, we are not breeders. We are the two people who got the law changed so that hedgehogs are legal in Fairfax County. Note: Hedgehogs are not yet legal in Fairfax County!We put together this site so that prospective hedgehog owners in Fairfax would have somewhere to turn for guidance. While we haven’t been hedgehog owners for long, you can be assured that all the information on this site is correct. Please feel free to look around, and check back often as we will be updating the site frequently.

How did we get the law changed? It's quite a story... It started when we got our first chinchilla. I looked all over the web to find good chinchilla sites, and I came across chin-n-quills. (See links) I usually hung around the chinchilla part of the forum, but hedgehogs had always piqued my curiosity so I started doing research on c-n-q. The more I learned, the more I liked them. I did research for months, and finally decided I was ready. I searched around to find a breeder. That breeder was Amy Kartage. My father and I talked to her for about a month, and once everything was set up, we realized that hedgehogs were illegal in Fairfax. We were upset, and decided to find out why they were illegal. I found minutes from a meeting online at www.fairfaxcounty.gov and they seemed to state that hedgehogs are legal. (To read the minutes click here. Look at the text in bold) We called the Fish and Game Reserve to sort things out. The officer's name who answered our call was Scott Cole. When we mentioned that we had a question about hedgehogs, he said "Again? That's the third call today!" We then went on to learn that many people called every day asking about hedgehogs. We told him about our findings and he said he would find out what had happened. He called back two weeks later and informed us. He said that it had been suggested that they be legal, but the board unanimously voted it down. And I quote, "Commissioner Moon MOVED TO RECOMMEND THAT THE BOARD OF SUPERVISORS APPROVE THE PROPOSED ZONING ORDINANCE AMENDMENT DEALING WITH THE DEFINITION OF COMMONLY ACCEPTED PETS AS OUTLINED IN THE STAFF REPORT DATED JULY 9, 2001." We asked why this happened and he said he had absolutely no idea. He suggested that we call Jerry Highland, the board member who brought the case up in 2001. We did just that. We started by talking to his chief aid, Charles Unger. We learned that there had been no apparent reason for it to be voted down, but it was. He suggested that we talk to the supervisor of our district, Cathleen Hudgins.