So this past week at work was basically the unofficial Wildlife Week. As I mentioned before, HAH is the only animal hospital in the area that accepts any kind of wildlife, any time of the day. It makes for a great learning experience, even though it’s sad at times. Since there are no limitations as to what wildlife can be brought into the hospital, we all see a little bit of everything.

Aside from every day clients bringing in different wildlife, there is a specific woman, Randi, that comes in fairly frequently. Randi is a wildlife activist on her own, so whenever she comes in, she has multiple stories to tell and multiple animals that need help. This particular week, Randi brought in a black squirrel and a small wild rabbit.

With the work that Randi does, she is bound by law to euthanize any injured animal that she catches if she cannot help that and release them on their own shortly after. The black squirrel unfortunately had to face this. Apparently, the squirrel’s nest was in a tree that had been cut down. Since the squirrel was in the nest as it happened, he had fallen out of the tree and face-first onto concrete. He was very much alive, but his teeth had been bent backwards from the fall and they were growing in completely wrong. This hindered his ability to eat anything solid. One of the doctors clipped the squirrel’s teeth in hopes of fixing the situation, but she then discovered that his teeth would have to continuously be clipped for him to be able to eat and survive. Unfortunately, this meant the squirrel had to be euthanized. The following picture is of the doctor working on the squirrel’s teeth.

The second animal that Randi brought in was a very small rabbit. This rabbit had been caught by a dog. Although the rabbit was still alive, one of his rear legs were broken. I did not know this until Randi told me, but it is practically impossible for a wild rabbit to live with a broken back leg because it won’t be able to hop away from predators, or hop around in general, really. I had hoped we would be able to nurse it back to health, but there was no way we could have kept a cast on a wild rabbit for a long enough period of time for it to heal. Therefore, they had to euthanize this little guy as well because he could not healthily be released again. This was obviously quite a disappointing moment for all of us, but there was a small bright side: I learned how to detect a broken leg on a rabbit. The doctor held the rabbit while I felt his legs, and sure enough, I could feel a bone sticking out where it didn’t belong (sorry for the mental picture, guys). This is how small he was compared to Randi’s hands:

On a brighter note, there was one little rabbit that survived and was released happy and healthy! Randi did not bring him in, but she was there to help with it all. A cat had actually brought this little rabbit into one of our clients’ homes, and they brought it into HAH. Turns out the cat had only left a minuscule puncture wound on the rabbit’s front leg. He had a tiny bit of blood on him, but we cleaned him up, checked him out, and released him to the wild again. This was the best part of the week, simply because it’s times like these that makes all of the negative times worth it. It’s incredibly rewarding to be able to help nurse an injured animal back to health. This is a photo of the little rabbit as he was hanging out in the incubator (he looks very similar to the previous one):

Despite the fact that it was a fairly stressful and sad week in the wildlife aspect, I was able to learn new information pertaining to wildlife, which will definitely benefit me in the future. I learned how to handle them, I learned how to approach different situations and determine what’s best, I learned how to make educated judgment calls when it comes to wildlife, and I was also able to encounter some pretty cute wild animals.