LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — There are many ways to become a hero. Firefighters save lives every day, but they do not usually make rescues like the one they attempted on Wednesday, March 20 when they extracted a hedgehog that had been stuck inside a man’s car for more than 36 hours.
“They gave me a responsibility for an animal and I screwed it up,” Ruben Guajardo said with a laugh.
Guajardo said he started pet-sitting the hedgehog on Sunday when its owner and her family went on vacation for spring break. Guajardo said the girl who owns it told him it needed time to run around and exercise. Everything went well on the first day, but a quick moment apart Monday evening brought trouble.
“I put him in the vehicle, on the passenger side on the floor with his little food, just to play,” Guajardo recalled. “I go inside real quick just to check on my pork chops, came back, he vanished. I thought he pulled a Sonic the Hedgehog on me, for real. He just disappeared. And I was searching and searching, couldn’t find him.
“And then, when I was driving the next day, in the morning, I heard him inside the console. Way inside, by the transmission, just in there. He was scratching. I don’t know what he was doing, so I said, hold up, pulled over and I realized he was there. And I didn’t have tools to get him out or nothing, so I was like, ‘I’m going to leave him there overnight, with little blankies and the food, and in the morning, I’ll figure out what to do.’ So, when I came (to work), I thought about, well, let me go to the fire station. They save pets, too, right?
“I went in there, I got off, I knocked. Nobody answered. I’m looking everywhere. A guy opens the door, he’s like, ‘how can I help you?’ I was like, sir, you’re not going to believe this, but I need some help. I’ve got a hedgehog stuck under my car. And he was, like, flabbergasted.”
Guajardo, a barber at World Champion Cutts on Daisy L. Gatson Bates Drive, made the short drive to the Little Rock Fire Department’s station at 7th and Chester.
“We were doing business as usual,” Ben Bradford recalled Wednesday afternoon. “Gentleman pulled up and rang our doorbell and said that he had a hedgehog in his center console that was trapped and had been there for three days.
“We didn’t believe it at first, and he told us to come look.”
Bradford was one of a few firefighters at the station at the time. He and a couple others spent 15-20 minutes taking apart the center console of Guajardo’s SUV in order to pull out the hedgehog. By that point, several other firefighters had returned to the station, and all the administrative staff came downstairs to the parking lot to watch.
“Uh, I wouldn’t say it’s the weirdest, but it’s up there with the weirder calls,” Bradford said. “He did let us play with the hedgehog. He did show us that they’re actually fairly soft, unless they want to get you.”
Guajardo said he went to the fire station because he knew of the stories of people asking firefighters to retrieve cats that had gotten stuck in trees.
“I just knew they weren’t gonna say no,” he said.
Bradford said that is simply the nature of a firefighter. “Because we like to always try to help people, we went out there and tried to help him,” he stated.
Guajardo filmed on his phone, laughing along with the firefighters as they rescued his hedgehog. He was relieved to see the hedgehog in good shape when it was freed, through it appeared to be frightened.
“I was more concerned about my friend and her daughter,” Guajardo joked. “They were gonna kill me!”
After he posted some of his videos to Facebook, he knew he had to tell them about his mishap. “Man, she almost passed out,” he said, “but then I was like, hold up. There’s something good came out of it.”
That may be difficult for the hedgehog’s owner to see, but it was clearly visible on Guajardo’s face and in his voice as he discussed the firefighters.
“I mean, it’s just like,” he said, pausing to gather his thoughts, “that shows us that they’re there 24/7. Any time you need any help or assistance with anything, it doesn’t matter if it’s out of their repertoire, they’re still there to help. And that’s amazing, and it’s good to be surrounded by people like that.”
Guajardo said he had never met a firefighter before, and their willingness to bail him out of a potentially-embarrassing moment changed him. “It made me more humble,” he stated. “Like, I feel more confident to walk up to a fireman or to a police officer.”
“I believe things happen for a reason<” he continued. “I believe that, for some reason, she came and asked me to take care of her little pet. And I really don’t talk to her like that, I talk to her mother a lot more. And she came up to me and asked me, and I was like, I happily obliged. And look what happened. It gave me an opportunity to network, it gave me an opportunity to grow in every aspect, and it was a great experience. I enjoyed the laughs, the conversations, and just the tranquility that I had, of just being safe.”
Guajardo said the hedgehog ate some of its food and drank water afterward. He decided to put it in a box as he drove back to work and put a small blanket in the box to let it sleep comfortably. Knowing it would be fine allowed him to see just how unusual and funny his plea for help was.
“I had never had an animal,” he explained. “It was my first time babysitting any type of animal. It just shows how irresponsible I was! Do not trust me with your animal!”
Guajardo will keep the hedgehog for the rest of the week, until its owner comes home from vacation. And despite this near-catastrophe, he says he might get one of his own.