A few nice facts about animals images I found:
I saved a baby bunny today- I'm so used to taming hamsters I started to let it explore a little, and then remembered it's wild and will hopfully be reintroduced so I shouldn't let it get to comfortable
Image by Ninithedreamer
This morning I was walking my friend to the New Brunswick train station and we found a baby bunny sitting next to a tree on the city sidewalk. At first we thought it was dead because it was so dehydrated it wasn't really moving. The area of New Brunswick it was, was very city-like. I don't know how the baby bunny got seperated from it's mom, or how far it traveled, but there was NO WHERE remotely resembling anyplace a nest/burrow could possibly be. So I took it home.
I did research online and decided that it's best chance for survival was to find a wildlife rehabilitator who knew what they were doing and would eventually be able to reintroduce it into the wild. It took me over 2 hours trying to track someplace down, I kept being given number after number for place after place. I was leaving messages everywhere. Finally I got a call back from someplace called The Mercer County Wildlife Center. Unfortunantly it was an hour away and I don't have a car. I made a LOT of phone calls and finally found someone who was amazing enough to drive me. So we drove ALL the way there. They took the bunny though they weren't too friendly. They did tell me though that the bunny was 2 weeks old so I'd been right about it still nursing. Anyways I left feeling really good.
About two hours afterwards I got a call from one of the other places I'd left a message. This lady was really nice, BUT told me that the Mercer County Wildlife Center was the worst place I could've taken the bunny. She said that normally she would never speak negatively about someplace like that but that she had an experience recently where this doctor she was working with took a healthy raccoon there and they euthenized it for no reason!!! That it's a government funded place and the government is really pro it so has worked really hard to cut out independents like herself, but that basically the people working there are doing it more for the paycheck then because they care for the animals. That when the place closes at night at 7pm, they go home and leave all the animals. That when they get birds like sparrows and there was another one I can't remember the name, that because those birds aren't really indigenous to New Jersey, instead of helping them, they just euthenize them. They don't care that people like me cared enough about them to drive an hour or whatever there. She said that the Wildlife Center there is more interested in the hunting license aspect of their business, then in really helping the animals (she's not funded for the animals she rehabilitates- I mean right now she has 9 baby raccoons whose care she pays for out of pocket)
Clearly the first thing I wanted to do was go back there and demand my baby bunny back. It made me reflect on my treatment from the place. Like when I did speak to someone on the phone to begin with, I was like, "I don't have a car to drive to you." And the lady on the phone was so cold and snapish when she said, "Well we don't pick up the animals." I mean no offense but according to what I found online it would be illegal for me to keep that bunny. So while yes they may not pick up animals you would think that she would try to help me figure out ideas on how to get the bunny to a rehabilitator. I don't know. I just found it really weird the way the lady on the phone was. And then when I was actually there they were so cold. They didn't care at all about where I had found the bunny or how I had found the bunny, or even if I had made the effort to find the bunnies Mom which is important because just because you think the baby or babies were abandoned doesn't usually mean that they were. So what this lady was saying about the Mercer County Wildlife Center made a lot of sense.
I thought about it and there really wasn't much I could do about it. She pointed out that even if I asked for the bunny back, doesn't mean that they'd give me the same one- I mean I'm sure they have lots of bunnies. And the fact is, that since the state DOES support them, I am going to have to go with the good faith that they WILL help my bunny and they WILL reintroduce it back to the New Brunswick area where I found it. Because I really don't want to think about the alternative.
It's sad that there is the possibility that it won't be getting the quality of care that I was hoping it would. I have such good feelings towards wildlife rehabilitators because of bsheridan1959 and it's so disappointing to discover that not all rehabilitators are as caring about the animals as she is. That there IS all kinds of politics and other garbage that come into play so that it's no longer about the animals.
I'm really glad that I was able to give this baby bunny a fighting chance, it's just disappointing to find out all this information about the place I took the bunny too which puts a damper on that the 'high' I felt from saving a baby bunny.
The only thing I can do as suggested by the lady on the phone, is contact both the senator in charge of my county and the govenor. Because all of this aside, it was really frustrating to have to drive a whole hour because there just wasn't anywhere closer to me that rehabilitates animals. She said that there used to be a lot of people like herself but that this place and who they work for has just taken over, getting rid of the majority of the 'little guys.'
I do have a case number so I will be checking up on the little character. I sure hope they're truthful about it's progress but no matter what, I knew my mind/and heart were in the right place and that I did the best I could.
