Nothing prepares you for the moment you enter the Appleby home. Outside it is a pleasant semi on a pleasant Redcar street. Inside: chaos.

Where most homes have a hallway, Lynne and Pearl have an old newspaper cuttings area. Kitchen? A larder for hedgehog feed. Living room? A sanctuary for no fewer than 67 hedgehogs, last count.

Only the mother and daughter's bedrooms have been free of the patter of tiny hedgehog feet since the day they turned their home into a sanctuary back in 1989.

Since then the Applebys have struggled to save the lives of and provide care for nearly 1,000 hedgehogs. The effort it has taken to do that is beyond measure: the £3,000 a year they must find from their own pockets is the least of it. This unusual couple have often stayed up all night nursing hedgehog young, trawled gardens for injured hedgehogs, nursed hundreds of the creatures which have been kicked, burned and stabbed by people and released and monitored the progress of hundreds more into the wild.

And now, after all those years of struggle, they listen to the news that up to 5,000 hedgehogs are to be summarily executed in a single Government-sponsored cull.

You may be sure the story of the cull of the hedgehogs on the Outer Hebrides islands of North Uist, South Uist and Benbecula is no mildly diverting And Finally news item to the Applebys. To them, it is nothing short of a tragedy, one they believe unnecessary and have fought to prevent.

"We've campaigned against it and had more than 500 letters and emails from people in and around Redcar sent up there to oppose it," said Lynne. "And I don't think it's done a scrap of good.

"Scottish Natural Heritage were going to make this decision. Nothing was going to stop them. We were just some interfering English idiots as far as they were concerned."

Not that Lynne doesn't accept there isn't a problem in the Hebridean isles. They know 5,000 hedgehogs in a few square miles is no joke.

The hedgehogs were first discovered on the island in 1974 and are thought to have been introduced by a gardener, keen for the creatures to eat the grubs infesting his prize lawn.

Since then, the population has exploded to 5,000, producing about 10,000 young annually. The little beasts quickly discovered a huge food source in the vast wader bird populations that nest on the sands. The voracious hedgehogs eat the eggs and young of the 17,000 pairs of lapwing, redshank, dunlin, snipe, ringed plover and oystercatchers in enormous quantities. The population of the wader birds has declined by as much as 60 per cent. Everyone agrees something must be done.

"Hedgehog lovers across Britain have never said, 'just do nothing,'" says Lynne. "The British Hedgehog Preservation Society has always argued for relocation. There's actually a problem in Surrey because there's such a shortage of hedgehogs. There's an entire network of people like me across Britain prepared to take them on temporarily. More than £50,000 has been raised for a proper, scientific relocation programme.

"Scottish Natural Heritage say it would cause too much stress to the hedgehogs. Well I've released many profoundly unstressed hedgehogs before. This is really about money."

Scottish Natural Heritage deny the charge, arguing that relocating such a vast number of hedgehogs is no simple issue. They say they had no choice but to send out officers to capture hedgehogs in mink traps baited with fish and to search them out with pointer dogs before administering lethal injections.

Meanwhile, as the Scottish creatures are culled by the thousand, Lynne and her mother continue their daily task of saving each and every hedgehog they find injured on the roads and hedgerows of the North-East.