Hooray, hedgehogs! Arizona officials lift restrictions on pet ownership

PHOENIX — Hedgehogs are cute, if you like small, spiny four-legged mammals.

And now the Arizona Game and Fish Department has determined domesticated hedgehogs are OK to keep as pets, downgrading them from the list of restricted wildlife allowed in homes.

What changed? Officials finally decided the housebroken animals posed no threat to contaminating the outdoor herd, so to speak, should they escape into the wild.

Their inability to survive in the wild has afforded them the luxury of living it up indoors for a few years. Nice.

While the curious begin rampaging through the Internet for pet hedgehog information, we’ve thought of some hedgehogs that have been immortalized in books, video games, TV and movies.

Some of them have to be domesticated — they wear pants and shoes and talk and have morals.

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Sonic the Hedgehog

He’s fast and supremely confident. Sonic and his pals also regularly beat the pants off his archnemesis Dr. Eggman. Team Sonic was originally a video game then was turned into a cartoon TV series. He’s been around since 1991.

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Alfred Hedgehog

Alfred mostly looks like a kid in a costume, but he is the star of “The Mysteries of Alfred Hedgehog.” Ol’ Alf was the Encylopedia Brown of cartoon animals. The 2010 cartoon series set in Gnarly Woods only lasted for half a year.

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Mr. Pricklepants

This stuffed guy, voiced by Timothy Dalton, turned up in “Toy Story 3” and will be in the fourth entry of the popular big-screen franchise. He considers himself quite the actor. … All righty then.

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Stickly-Prickly

This hedgehog was the creation of author Rudyard Kipling and appeared in “Just So Stories.” He and his tortoise buddy Slow-Solid lived in the Amazon, where they outsmart a jaguar. They should totally pat themselves on the back.