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WILDLIFE REHABILITATION
- Is It Worth It?
by Megan Morris-Jones
In September last year, an excellent article by Paul Evans appeared in the BBC Wildlife Magazine, asking the question: Does Wildlife Rehabilitation work? For the article, he interviewed, amongst others, the RSPCA Wildlife Hospital in Cheshire, Les Stocker of St. Tiggywinkles Wildlife Hospital in Buckinghamshire and myself here at Cuan House.
He discusses attitudes, policies and looks at which creatures generally stand the best chance of survival. To quote Paul: "The hope for each animal is rehabilitation, the official definition of which is: 'The managed process whereby a displaced, sick, injured or orphaned wild animal regains the health and skills it requires to function normally and live self-sufficiently'. But what are the chances of survival for these animals when they are returned to the wild?"
Having been working with Wildlife now for nearly 20 years (dating back to when I took in my first bird casualty, an exhausted Manx Shearwater, while we were living on the little Scottish island of Luing), inevitably I have come to question some of the aspects of what we, as rehabilitators, do with some of the patients entrusted to our care.
Rehabilitating adult wildlife casualties poses considerably fewer problems than the juveniles. It is safe to assume that an adult will have had some experience of life in the wild, it should be relatively street-wise, the decision of where to release it is not so problematic as, unless there is a very good reason to indicate otherwise, adult birds and animals should go back to the area from where they came, where they may have a mate waiting or at least they will be familiar with their territory or hunting-ground. Indeed, it would be to their detriment, in most cases, to release them anywhere else. If it is in good condition when it is brought in (and, therefore, we can assume it has been coping up till the time it has been, for example hit by a car, caught in a fence etc.), then it can reasonably be assumed that it will cope again - provided we can be certain it is fully fit upon release.
It is a much greyer area where juveniles are concerned, and there are several questions rehabilitators need to ask themselves very soon after the admission of any youngster. Taking into account its relative or total lack of experience of life in the wild, the first and most obvious question is: having been reared by humans, what are its chances of survival once released? The answer will depend on many factors: the species (through experience, we know that some species do well despite having human foster-parents, e.g. blackbirds and hedgehogs amongst others), whether it is reared with others of its kind, the reason for admission in the first place, its state of health or the nature of its injury, the method of release i.e. a 'soft' release where the release door/hatch of its pen/aviary is left open for it to come and go and return for food, or a 'hard' release where it is taken somewhere and let go (dumped?), whether it is a hunter or a forager or an opportunist feeder, and whether it is a territorial species and may have difficulty establishing its own place.
Perhaps most difficult of all, though, are the 'runts' and/or nature's rejects. The baby bird that has been turfed out by a cuckoo is not meant to survive, and I question whether we have the right to attempt to alter the fate nature intended for it - an attempt that would invariably result in a slower, more prolonged, death than it would endure if left alone. I make a strong distinction between nature's casualties and those whose state has been caused by man's intervention, the chopping down of trees, killing an adult parent and leaving a brood of healthy young to starve, the eternal moggy that is responsible for so much suffering to thousands of garden birds every summer. With such as these, I believe we have a right and a moral duty to intervene.
However, the biggest dilemma - for me - arises when we receive a sickly youngster with no apparent reason for its under-development and that, despite all our efforts: a good diet, vitamins, medication if appropriate, it just fails to thrive. At some point, we have to stop and ask ourselves: is it in the creature's interests to continue? Quite often, when we have put to sleep an animal with which we have been struggling, our vet has found on post-mortem an abnormality in the gut which has prevented the animal absorbing its food properly. Is it a genuine runt that we are so desperately trying to save, and for whose sake, and are we fighting nature in willing it to survive? And if we do 'succeed' in pulling it through, weeks or maybe months later, how much have we damaged it by our intervention, prolonged human contact, medication, unnatural diet, solitary confinement and so on? Most important of all, and I believe this is the crux question: by releasing into the wild a natural runt (the "let's give it a chance" gesture) that, by natural selection, would, and probably should, have died weeks ago, are we perpetuating the problem by going against the whole Darwinian theory of natural selection and survival of the fittest and sending into the wild the weaker of the species that might then go on to breed yet more weaklings?
I realise that my comments will not be welcomed by some readers, but they are based on many years of rearing youngsters and talking to other rehabilitators.
To quote Andrew Kelly, Manager of RSPCA Stapeley Grange, in Paul's article: "We have to open people's eyes to the fact that treatment is not always best for welfare ….. Euthanasia is not a failure, but a tool - a useful option for animal welfare, if it ends suffering." There are no easy answers to the questions I have raised, but my hope is that we shall face this summer's inevitable onslaught of babies and juveniles with an approach that is both realistic and, at the end of the day, humane.
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