Short and Sweet

 

And, don’t forget: you heard it here, folks: a Howard County hedgehog is a finalist for the next Cadbury Bunny.

Truth in advertising: this story pulled from a Twitter link.

Howard County hedgehog is a finalist for the next Cadbury Bunny Bryna Zumer for WMAR2 Baltimore

Are you familiar with the annual Cadbury chocolates adverts where a variety of animals are depicted auditioning to be the Cadbury Bunny? Here’s the original from 1994.

Cadbury Easter Bunny Tryouts

In 2019 Cadbury used the framework of the original ad campaign to launch a nationwide contest.

Cadbury hosting new Cadbury Bunny contest for Easter Wesley Coburn for dogoday.com

This year there are ten finalists and adorable Maple, a two year old African Pygmy Hedgehog, is one of them. You can learn more about Maple in Ms. Zumer’s article (linked above) and on Maple’s very own  Instagram account. She has over 10,600 followers. Unbelievably, there are at least ten Instagram accounts with variations on that name. Accept no substitutions. Look for maplehedgie.

When I read long ago that in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes, I did not anticipate that pets would be included. It’s possible that Andy Warhol didn’t either. Social media sure sped that up. When I was growing up the only famous pets in my frame of reference were Rin Tin Tin and Lassie, although they were really before my time. Well, perhaps Morris the Cat, the professional mascot for Nine Lives cat food, was the most famous “pet” of my childhood. 

What a long and strange road from Morris to Jorts, eh?

Now ordinary household pets have their own social media accounts and vie for clout and even sponsorships. Their owners generate storylines for them and even sell merch. I’m not quite sure how I feel about all this, in particular: do the animals at the center of this trend actually have happy lives? I sure hope so.

Back to Maple. Here she is, enjoying some watermelon.

Photo courtesy of maplehedgie Instagram 

If you’d like to support the cute little Hedgehog who is Howard County’s first ever finalist in Cadbury’s Bunny contest, you can vote daily through March 22nd. You’ll have to register first but it’s easy and they don’t ask for much information.

Vote for Maple

A bonus for your participation is this:

Cadbury is donating five thousand dollars to the ASPCA along with an additional five thousand donation for every five thousand incremental votes up to a total of twenty thousand dollars.

That’s pretty sweet.