09/03/2025
We apologize for the long post, but please take one moment to read this heartfelt plea.
Yesterday we had someone bring in a wild baby bunny, heavily injured and near death. Its condition was never in debate. However, this person wanted extreme details we weren’t able to provide as it had just arrived, and like a switch, they flipped from moderate to nearly criminal, threatening to punch an employee in the face, calling out an employee’s perceived political status (“you’re obviously a democrat”), many, many “f bombs”, threatening violence, and then followed up by calling the police (who did NOT investigate - and mentioned that even they had to yell over this person to get them to calm down on the phone). All over a wild baby bunny who died shortly after arrival.
We share this story because it’s not even unheard of for us to be abused in this way, though even for vet med, this was extreme. There is so much mental illness in the world today that is vented outward and toward compassionate people trying to do their job. It’s always the wildlife for us though. The amount of verbal abuse we take attempting to help our community and the wildlife in it is STAGGERING!
Here’s where we differ from most rehabbers:
- We are a business that must answer the phone and handle (talk to, give instructions to, sadly argue with) each finder. There’s no answering machine or texting to allow us to filter callers.
- We have regular, very important, patients to see at the same time we are taking in wild animals. While all of this was going on yesterday we were attending to a VERY critical patient who came in on emergency. Our lead technician was literally managing a critical case and talking to the police at the same time, completely unnecessarily.
- We welcome any and all wildlife. We don’t specialize, we take in and triage any wild animal. This means our knowledge base must be vast, changing on the fly from a fox to a hawk to a song bird to a field mouse, sometimes all in one day. It also means it’s extremely time consuming.
- In addition to taking in wildlife directly, we work with every rehabber in the area, medically treating animals we can or euthanizing animals in need of that blessing at the end of their lives. We get wildlife from every direction and when rehabbers close their doors to intakes, our intakes increase. We never close.
- As a public small business, we are open to google reviews and have social media places unhappy wildlife finders can go to. The unwarranted bad reviews (I couldn’t get an update on a wild bird I dropped off 2 weeks ago, this place is terrible) directly affects our real business!
- Lastly, we don’t get paid anything and we get far less donations than public rehabbers. That’s ok, we take nothing away from them and are grateful when they are able to take our triaged animals. Our own profits are put into wildlife care. We offer a free service and wild animals are treated with state of the art tools and medications.
ALL of this to say, we are dangerously close to closing our doors to wildlife for the first time in over 40 years of strong commitment. We work so hard for wild animals and for this community, harder than most will ever realize, and on a daily basis we must argue the animals out of their finder’s hands. We are yelled at, berated. All for free!!! We in vet med and certainly we as a business, cannot keep doing this. We can’t continue to suffer the brunt of what is wrong with people, of the emotional baggage everyone seems to be carrying these days. It’s too much. Some days (yesterday!) all of us need therapy before we go home, and yet home we go carrying the day, where we’ve been told how terrible we are, with us.
Tell a vet, tell a rehabber, tell a technician or staff member you appreciate them today! We don’t know the answers to all of these problems but it must start somewhere.
(Shout out to Nothing Bundt Cakes who regularly stops by to check on us and deliver cakes for free - you came by at just the right time and we were so grateful!)
*picture of a recent intake. A Coopers Hawk was found in a field unable to fly. He had all of his wing feathers cut off. It’s presumed these birds are caught in a chicken coop and either “punished” or someone was attempting to keep them in captivity. Unbelievably, this the second time we’ve seen this happen, and for these very active (self destructive) birds, it’s essentially a death sentence for reasons to numerous too go into here.
