A WARNING has been issued by hedgehog campaigners after one of the spiky creatures was killed in a garden trap.

Jamie Clarke was horrified to find a dead hedgehog on Wednesday evening in the squirrel trap he had reluctantly had positioned in his Oxford garden by a pest control company.

He said: “My first thought was to keep my children from seeing it - as they love hedgehogs and would have been distraught to find we had inadvertently killed one.

"My second was anger - how could a pest control company be so reckless as to place traps like this in our garden?”

The pest controller who set the trap, which was a WCS Tube Trap, said in more than a decade on the job he had never seen it happen.

He added: "I was utterly gutted when I found the poor hedgehog.

"I told the client, I will spread the word to the industry, we must ensure that traps are set in such a way that hedgehogs are not killed.”

It comes after Hugh Warwick, also known as Hedgehog Hugh, launched HedgeOX in June to try to reverse in Oxfordshire the plummeting population of the prickly mammals seen across the UK in recent years.

The latest results from the State of Britain’s Hedgehogs report, published earlier this year, reveal that urban hedgehog numbers are down by 30 per cent since the turn of the century, and rural numbers down more than 50 per cent.

He said: "For the most part the campaign is very positive.

"The reaction to our presence at Countryfile Live, for example, was overwhelmingly positive. But to find that traps are being used, the WCS Tube Trap in this case, which can kill hedgehogs is an outrage."

He has been encouraging people in the county to become 'hedgehog heroes' by working with neighbours to make a ‘hedgehog highway’ cutting CD disk-sized holes in fences to allow hedgehogs to pass.

Farmers and gardeners are also being encouraged to plant more hedges and allow the ones already there the space to grow into a hedgehog habitat.

Speaking about Mr Clarke's situation and the issue of traps in general British Hedgehog Preservation Society chief exec Fay Vass said: "This is a very distressing case, but sadly not isolated.

"We have been in touch with DEFRA about the dangers traps pose to our dwindling hedgehog population.Their response has been that it is down to the trapper to ensure non-target species are excluded from traps."

She added: "Here we clearly see how even a professional with many years’ experience failed to do this and the result is another dead hedgehog.

"BHPS has been campaigning against the use of the A24 trap in the UK, developed to kill hedgehogs in New Zealand, and now being sold unaltered here, it is widely available online and is of great concern.”

For more visit britishhedgehogs.org.uk and hedgeox.org