Tom Foote shared some interesting thoughts about wildlife rehabilitation
and wondered if it might be worthwhile to discuss the subject further.

I firmly believe several things about it:

On the DOWN side:

Rehabbing doesn't help animal populations or the environment in any
measurable way, shape, or form. I think this is incontrovertible.

Because rehabbing exists, many people pick up baby animals (remember, birds
are animals) that should be left where they are.

Because (some) animals can be rehabilitated, it takes just a little bit of
the pressure off the causes of their needing to be rehabbed: oil spills,
kids with BB guns, cats in yards, etc. This is one of my personal problems
with it. I think there are people who see birds being cleaned up and
released after an oil spill who reduce their indignation slightly because
of this, but no one tells them that those birds are unquestionably of
lowered fitness and may well be doomed anyway.

The more extreme efforts (saving gray whales trapped in arctic ice, flying
hummingbirds from Alaska in winter) perhaps lend themselves to ridicule,
because the cost/benefit ratio is unreasonable. We ask questions about
cost/benefit ratios in saving people's lives, so we ought to ask them here
as well.

On the UP side:

Rehabbing makes rehabbers happy, and they have just as much right to feel
happy in what they are doing as anyone else does. This is often overlooked
in discussions of this sort. In addition, those people who bring in wild
animals to be helped also feel better, and this is not inconsequential (I
think we all need to feel a little better than we do).

The publicity and some of the individual animals involved in rehabbing
contribute in some positive ways to education, to which none of us should
object.

On the SO WHAT? side:

If it ends up as a weighing of the relative merits of saving time, money,
personal energy or other resources for other endeavors vs. trying to save
an individual life, I doubt that our judgments can be anything other than
subjective. Where I would try to inject a bit more objectivity into
rehabbing would be for people in general to be able to more accurately
assess the probability of saving a life vs. the efforts put into doing
so--a triage of sorts.

Furthermore, as is typical of human endeavors, even the rehabbers don't
agree. Some of them euthanize animals others would save. Or, one could
put it that some of them attempt to save animals others would euthanize.

I would welcome comments on Tom's and my thoughts. We *have* discussed
this before on tweeters, but the membership is changing, and there's no
harm in refreshing ourselves with an infusion of new ideas.

Dennis Paulson, Director phone 206-756-3798
Slater Museum of Natural History fax 206-756-3352
University of Puget Sound e-mail dpaulson at ups.edu
Tacoma, WA 98416