Should a robot mower run at night if hedgehogs visit your garden?

Letting a robot mow while everyone sleeps sounds considerate. In a garden visited by hedgehogs, it puts the machine to work while the animals are out. Oxford's January 2024 guidance recommends checking the lawn for hedgehogs before starting a robotic mower and running it only during daylight hours. The research behind it found that some tested models could injure hedgehog carcasses. Separate encounters with live hedgehogs used a disarmed mower: some animals ran away, but others stood partly curled up or approached it. You cannot plan on the animal getting out of the way. These are older studies, not a test of every mower sold today. They do give me a reason not to treat an obstacle-detection claim as permission to leave a mower running overnight. Daylight scheduling and a lawn check reduce risk; they are not a guarantee that no animal is present. I'd want a mower's setup to ask about wildlife before offering overnight mowing as a convenient schedule. If a delayed job runs out of daylight, leave the grass unfinished rather than automatically catching up after dark. That's a design choice I'm proposing, not a feature the research tested. A slightly untidy lawn until tomorrow seems a very reasonable trade for sharing the garden.