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The LORD keeps you from all harm and watches over your life.
PSALM 121:7
As lighthearted and fun as raccoon gangs, pigeons gone bad, and other amusing aspects of wildlife rehabilitation can be, I would not be giving you the whole picture if I didn’t talk about dealing with the more difficult days. I have found it best to face the issues that come with wildlife rehab head-on with courage, calmness, and conviction—not that I always succeed at those at any given moment.
It’s not unusual for rehabbers to give up because of the weightier issues involved in working with wildlife. According to an International Wildlife Rehabilitation Council (IWRC) class I took, the average amount of time a rehabber lasts from getting his or her first permit or license to quitting completely is seven years. After only seven seasons, the average rehabber has had enough.
I don’t blame any rehabbers who lay this pursuit aside because of the difficulties. I haven’t reached the seven-year mark quite yet. I’m just coming through my fifth season as I write this, so I can’t be sure that I won’t be among them.
Think about it: One of the largest, most successful rehab centers in the country, with the most knowledgeable staff and a wealth of great volunteers, can cite a successful live animal release rate of only a little under 50 percent. That means just over half of the animals that come in are unable to be released back to the wild, and a large percentage of those animals die of injury or illness. If more than half of whatever you were involved with day in and day out did not go very well (or went very poorly), you might feel like quitting too.
I won’t spend a long time talking about the difficulties involved with wildlife rehab, but it’s important to realize that some days are more challenging than others…
0 for 1, 0 for 2, 0 for 3…
“Hey, how’s the wildlife thing going?” a well-meaning friend asks me one spring.
“Not so great yet,” I reply. “I got in a cute little squirrel, but it must have taken a major fall. It couldn’t move well and kept having seizures. All of the rehabbers I talked to for advice said it sounded like a neurological injury. They thought the squirrel might just need recovery time, but it got worse and worse instead of better. I’m starting off the season 0 for 1.”
“Hey, are you rehabbing any animals right now?” another interested friend asks.
“Well, I had a cute little squirrel with a neurological injury, but it didn’t make it. Then I took in a cat-bit bunny, and I treated its injuries and put it on antibiotics, hoping it would pull through. But it just couldn’t make it and died of infection. Now I’m 0 for 2.”
“Hey, what’s happening in the Lion’s Den?” another person inquires.
“First, this squirrel with seizures died. Then I got a cute little cat-bit bunny, but it died too. After that, four pinkie opossums came in, so young that their mouths were still tightly sealed except for the pinhole at the front (a weird thing with baby opossums). I tried to do something for them, but they were so little and so dehydrated that they died before I could get them to an opossum expert a couple of hours away. Now I’m 0 for 3, 0 for 4, 0 for 5, 0 for 6, all in one night.”
“Hey, what’s going on with your rehabbing these days?” asks the next person.
“Don’t ask! I’ll let you know when something comes in that actually lives for me to tell about…”
As a rehabber, when you make out your annual report of every animal you took in and what happened to each, the release statistics can sometimes be hard to look at. In irrefutable black-and-white, the required paperwork reminds you that at least half of the time you were working with animals too compromised to make it. Those creatures came to a less than desirable end, and you had to watch it happen.
The success cases that do thrive and survive are so exciting they make the disasters worth dealing with, but there’s no doubt about it—losing animals is a gut-wrenching part of rehabbing. It takes some mental and emotional stamina to downplay the traumas and focus on the joys. I find I need to make a concerted effort to “Philippians 4:6 it,” as a preacher I once heard put it. You may be familiar with the verse: “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God” (NIV). When I do that in the discouraging times, I find that “the peace of God, which transcends all understanding” (verse 7) guards my heart and mind along the way.
It also helps to keep reading in that same Bible passage: “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things” (verse 8). When I put that into practice and think about how specially God has designed the animals and how He takes delight in them—even watching over a single sparrow that falls to the ground—it renews my courage, calmness, and conviction that I’m doing some good in spite of the difficult days.
Zoonosis Psychosis
Then there’s the difficulty of disease. The term zoonosis psychosis itself sounds like a dread disease, doesn’t it? Exactly. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines a zoonosis (pronounced zoh-uh-noh-sis) as “a disease communicable from animals to man under natural conditions.”1 Webster also defines psychosis as “extreme mental unrest of an individual or of a social group especially in regard to situational factors of grave import.”2
“Extreme mental unrest?” Exactly. “Grave import?” There’s a play on words for rehabbers. People can pick up diseases from wildlife in certain cases that are grave enough to put them in the grave. That’s definitely a downside of rehabbing! Precautions can be taken to prevent such tragedies; good hygiene alone provides much protection. Yet it becomes vitally important for rehabbers to know what zoonoses wild animals can carry and how those can be transmitted from their wild world to our civilized one. And I think sometimes with that knowledge comes the possibility of developing a human psychosis, never mind what the animals carry. Enter the maybe six-week-old raccoon kit that came my way a few seasons back from a local campground.
“Hello, I’m out at the campground, and there’s a little raccoon here that’s obviously an orphan. It has been pestering campers for days. Do you have room to take it in? It’s so hungry!”
“Sure thing; I’ll come take a look.” I was still a relatively new rehabber at the time, working under a mentor, and I wasn’t taking in sick or injured animals. But this raccoon kit looked neither. It was cute as a button. (Aren’t all baby animals? Except pinkies.) And it seemed fine to me—till I got it back to the Lion’s Den and it started displaying some weird and awful symptoms I was unfamiliar with. Disturbing thoughts run through my mind at moments like that—thoughts like rabies!
It wasn’t rabies—not in a Michigan raccoon anyway. As I mentioned earlier, a confirmed case of a rabid raccoon has not occurred in Michigan in more than two decades, so we’re still allowed to rehab that species. If and when an instance of rabies is verified in a raccoon or any other Michigan species, then rehabbers will no longer be able to take in that species—a safeguard to protect human health. Currently, such a prohibition is in force for bats and skunks here.
But because raccoons are still a rabies vector species (RVS) and it could happen, I would always rather be safe than sorry. I called a rehab mentor right away. “Hey, this little raccoon I just picked up seemed fine at first, but it’s going downhill fast. The way it’s acting is making me mighty nervous!”
I described all its symptoms, and fortunately this mentor identified the problem as coccidiosis (a nasty disease all by itself).
“Come get the medicine I have on hand just for this illness,” she told me, “and get some treatment going right away!”
That de-stressed me a little. Then she added, “Unfortunately, if the disease has taken too big a hold on too tiny an animal, we might not be able to get it under control in time. It sounds as if this baby was wandering around that campground for quite a while before they called you.”
That re-stressed me a lot. I did all that she advised, yet the raccoon kit still died (stress off the charts). Suffice it to say that its final moments left Michael (who was holding the baby at the time) and me with some mental images I would rather not retain.
“I never, ever want to go through anything like that again,” my husband said to me afterward. (Me neither.)
In addition to various illnesses, raccoons can carry parasites like Baylisascaris procyonis, or raccoon roundworm, which can also be fatal to humans. And raccoons can carry both canine and feline distemper, often fatal to pets. All of which prompts me to ask myself for the hundredth time, Why are raccoons my favorite again?
That’s just for starters, in a single wildlife species. And it’s also just the internal parasites and problems, not counting the external parasites like fleas and ticks. I frequently find it necessary to apply flea-and-tick repellent to wildlife babies that have lost their mother but brought her parasite load with them to the Lion’s Den. All of which tempts me to indulge in a little zoonosis psychosis. Or maybe a lot, depending on how often I remember to repeat Psalm 121:7 to myself: “The Lord keeps you from all harm and watches over your life.”
Not that I am presumptuous about that! I’ve studied which diseases are transmissible, how they are transmitted, and what kind of hygienic protocols to follow to keep them from transmitting themselves to my household or me. Long before the COVID-19 pandemic surfaced, I was already imagining particles of contagion on every surface I touched after handling wildlife, and I was already wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) and washing my hands continually. I had already developed the habit of being scrupulous about hygiene every single day, and sometimes I’m even a little nutty about it.
All Creation Groans
Every animal belongs to God, including the ill or injured ones. That’s a perplexing thought, I know. But just as God knows every sparrow that falls to the ground, He knows the health status of every one of His other creatures. We simply live in a world where the fullness of His kingdom is both “now and not yet,” as some of my favorite Bible teachers put it. Because of that, the line from the Lord’s Prayer where we ask that the Father’s will be done “on earth as it is in heaven” is still as vital for us to pray as when Jesus first instructed His disciples to do so.
I don’t believe God’s will is sickness and disease for us or for His creatures, yet those harsh realities are still part of this earthen realm we occupy until Christ comes again. While we wait for Jesus to return and restore this fallen world, all creation is indeed groaning toward that day. Romans 8:22 (NKJV) says that “the whole creation groans and labors.” Part of the pain is that people, animals, and plants suffer sickness, death, and decay. Sometimes illnesses are healed—sometimes not. But always in God’s larger view, there is hope for the future:
What we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will give us later. For all creation is waiting patiently and hopefully for that future day when God will resurrect his children. For on that day thorns and thistles, sin, death, and decay—the things that overcame the world against its will at God’s command—will all disappear, and the world around us will share in the glorious freedom from sin which God’s children enjoy.
For we know that even the things of nature, like animals and plants, suffer in sickness and death as they await this great event. And even we Christians, although we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, also groan to be released from pain and suffering. We, too, wait anxiously for that day when God will give us our full rights as his children, including the new bodies he has promised us—bodies that will never be sick again and will never die (Romans 8:18-23 TLB).
The intricacies of if/when/why/how healings take place are in the hands of God and are outside our domain. What is in our hands to do is help those who are ill in any way we can, be it through prayer, practical assistance, or appropriate medical treatment. We likewise groan with all creation toward the day that Revelation 21:3-4 describes for us—a day yet to come after His return:
Look, God’s home is now among his people! He will live with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them. He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever.
Now, that’s a day I certainly long for!
The Ultimate Difficulty
All kinds of things can take out a wild rehab animal in the blink of an eye—before I have time to do much of anything about it. Yet those deaths, believe it or not, are the “easier” ones to deal with. Or at least they are a little more guilt free than the very difficult ones that involve euthanasia. Making the decision to euthanize an animal is different from having a sick or injured creature come into rehab and soon die anyway in my care.
The animal that lingers—too ill or too injured to be brought back to health but still a day or so away from dying—is the hardest difficulty of all to face. At least in my state, rehabbers are allowed to make the determination to put such wild creatures out of their misery via humane euthanasia. No matter how quickly and painlessly it is carried out, euthanasia is unpleasant and awful. Still, there are times that rehabbers are thankful to have the option.
“Hello, I have a huge opossum that has been lying in the snow next to my house for several hours,” a caller said. “I have no idea why it isn’t moving, but it’s definitely alive and suffering. What should I do? I’m nervous about approaching it too closely, and I can’t drive.”
“Let me come over and take a look,” I answered and then headed the caller’s way. The opossum was still alive when I got there, but it couldn’t do more than lift itself up just a little and drag itself a few inches. No injuries were immediately apparent. Opossums here don’t carry much disease either, but something was terribly wrong.
“I’ll take it back to the Lion’s Den,” I told the finder. “Opossums really aren’t meant for Michigan winters, yet here they are in droves, and they don’t hibernate. They can suffer severe frostbite and get so hungry and weak that they can’t function. When they’re feeling like that, it’s not unusual for them to position themselves next to the foundation of a house, which can provide a little of the warmth they crave. This opossum might just need a night or two in a quiet place with nourishment and heat. I’m going to settle it into a warm, dark cage with food and water and observe it for 24 hours. If there’s no improvement, then something else is wrong. Do you have a shovel? Let’s scoop this critter into the animal carrier I brought, and I’ll take it with me and see what I can do for it.”
“Great!” the finder said. “I can’t stand watching it suffer lying out in the cold any longer. Let me know what happens with it.”
Back at the Lion’s Den, I offered the unhappy creature water, sardines, and carrots, which should have tempted any hungry opossum. It was breathing heavily, and it barely had the energy to react to my presence, never mind take any interest in my food offerings. I left it in a warm, dark, quiet cage overnight, but in the morning there was no improvement. Not one iota. So I made the difficult decision to transport it to a local animal shelter, where a worker euthanized it immediately.
Examining the poor animal with me afterward, this medically savvy shelter worker determined that it probably had an injured or possibly a punctured lung, which had likely resulted in pneumonia. A couple of what looked like older bite marks on its chest had been impossible to see without closer examination.
“I don’t think there was anything you could have done to save this opossum in its present condition,” the worker said. “It was too far gone. But at least we gently put it out of its misery, so that’s something.”
“It was so huge!” I said. “I imagine it must have had a very long, eventful life before whatever catastrophe befell it. For that much, I’m glad!”
Suffice it to say that euthanasia is a necessary evil that can sometimes be a kindness. It’s one more example of the “kingdom both now and not yet” we face in this still imperfect world of ours.
I’m glad, too, that sometimes seemingly impossible cases do turn around unexpectedly and have a far happier ending than I could ever have envisioned at the start. Frodo, whose tale is next, is one of those cases. Tales like his offset the difficult days by many a mile.
1Merriam-Webster Unabridged, s.v. “Zoonosis,” http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com/unabridged/zoonosis.
2Merriam-Webster Unabridged, s.v. “Psychosis,” http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com/unabridged/psychoses.