Dear Prime Min­is­ter Kevin Rudd,

In last Saturday’s Courier Mail a story (attached) ran depict­ing the Pygmy Hedge­hog. The Pygmy Hedge­hog, or African Pygmy Hedge­hog, is very small and cute. As you’ll see in the pic­ture from the attached arti­cle. It is also ille­gal to own one as a pet in Aus­tralia, and to import them (accord­ing to the Depart­ment of Envi­ron­ment Exotic Ani­mal Guide).

I write to peti­tion you to allow the import of these ani­mals into Aus­tralia because they are very cute and would make good pets.

They are, as I men­tioned, very small and unlikely to pose as a threat to nat­ural wildlife if released into the wild (but who would release a pet this cute into the wild).

They eat a bal­anced diet of insects and cat food.

The rea­son Wikipedia gives (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_hedgehog) for many coun­tries not allow­ing pygmy hedge­hogs is that they can carry “foot in mouth” disease.

I’m sure that you, as politi­cians, can relate to this dis­ease and under­stand that it is no big deal as the news cycle only lasts a cou­ple of days and then slip-ups are forgotten.

Foot in mouth dis­ease, and hedge­hogs (if eaten), may also help to erad­i­cate the cane toad.

Foot-in-mouth dis­ease is also car­ried by many other ani­mals. Includ­ing Deer. Which accord­ing to that same exotic ani­mal check­list (http://www.environment.gov.au/biodiversity/trade-use/exoticanimalguide/list.html) are able to be imported.

These are just a sam­pling of the rea­sons that you should con­sider to allow the import of these hedgehogs.

At the end of the day the equa­tion is very sim­ple. The cute­ness of these ani­mals far out­weighs any neg­a­tives as either a biose­cu­rity issue or envi­ron­men­tal impact.

If you are not able to allow the import of Pygmy Hedge­hogs at this time could you please advise what steps must be taken to one day enable Aus­tralian pet own­ers the basic human right to own what­ever ani­mal we please. This right was estab­lished in the Chris­t­ian cre­ation account in Gen­e­sis. In pro­hibit­ing the import of this ani­mal you are lim­it­ing our right to exer­cise domin­ion over cre­ation. I know you are both Chris­t­ian men so you will under­stand the impor­tance of this.

I have CC’d the Aus­tralian Chris­t­ian Lobby’s Jim Wal­lace in the hope that this mat­ter will become part of the ACL pol­icy plat­form. As you can tell I am keen to explore all pos­si­ble avenues of per­sua­sion in order to buy one of these for my wife. She isn’t sick or dying so I can’t tug on your heart strings. But she does love ani­mals. And I think this would be a fan­tas­tic Christ­mas present.

I look for­ward to receiv­ing your response.

Yours faith­fully,

Nathan Camp­bell
Townsville

PS. I didn’t vote for you last time — so I’ll under­stand if you don’t want to help me. But allow­ing the import of these hedge­hogs would sway my vote this time. They are bet­ter look­ing than Mal­colm Turnbull.