Whether it’s oohing and ahhing over the chimps at the zoo, staring enviously at fearless wild animal handlers on television, or an experience with a beloved pet, we’ve all had a moment were we wish we could work with animals. Sitting down at the Orinda Library, we talked to someone who actually works with wild animals every day: Rebecca Smith, wildlife rehabilitator, veterinary student at UC Davis, and former Green News writer. Rebecca shared with us her stories and her experience at the oldest rehab clinic in the country as well as one of the best zoos on the west coast.

So who are you and what exactly do you do?

I’m Becca, I went to Cal High and for college I went to UC Irvine, graduated with a Bachelor's of Science and Biology. I did wildlife rehab at Southern California Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center in Hungtington Beach.  I’m currently doing a wildlife rehabilitation internship at Lindsay Wildlife Museum and I’m starting veterinary school in the fall.

So it’s kind of interesting to work at two different centers. Wildlife rehab is completely different than it was 15 years ago. Before most people were just doing it out of their homes and now the veterinary field is a lot prettier and has expanded a lot.  People are still trying to figure out what rules and protocols to use what works and what does not because there are no studies on wildlife. Like, no one has done nutrition studies like they have on dogs and cats to know exactly what works, so it’s just the experiences of the people involved. For the longest time, there was no overall organization for people to share information, so each center had their own way of doing things. I’ve talked to people that have been doing this since the 60's and how much it’s changed. Lindsay Wildlife Museum is the oldest rehab center in the country, so it’s been there from the beginning and has watched how things have changed. My supervisors are some of the people that made up many of the protocols of how people around the country do things. It’s one of the largest rehab centers, and the oldest in the country.

Wildlife rehab is kind of like battlefield medicine. You have no money. Almost no one is paid, so it's like homeless shelters or battlefield medicine, you just have absolutely no money, not enough people, not enough time, not enough room, not enough resources, and you’re just doing the best you can, like trying to plug holes in a dyke that’s leaking. It’s kind of hard for people to get used to if they don’t have that mentality, or if they aren’t that kind of person, and the differences between. The two centers are kind of cool - the one in Huntington beach is basically a warehouse; it's not up to even the lowest people medicine standards, but at the same time it's people doing the best they can with what they have. Therefore, they did many seabirds, which we don’t really get here as much. So it’s learning husbandry trying to learn from people that have done it a lot longer than you, but using trial and error because each animal is different. So some of the things we only get in a couple a year, so there’s no one that has a lot of experience with them, so you have to kind of take things case by case.

It is fun though. You get to be around and work with things that no one else can, like it's illegal for the public to take care of wildlife, so unless you are at one of these rehab centers, you can’t do that. We have baby otters come in, and I get to feed raccoon babies, and it’s fun.  It’s hard, and a lot of volunteers drop out. It’s a very high turnover because people can’t handle it. They can’t understand the decisions that go into it. You know, in a slow season, maybe we could save this animal, but right now we’re too busy and there are so many other things that we can’t spend the time and resources on it. So sometimes people don’t understand triage, which is kind of hard.

When you said that in the past the different centers couldn’t share information, is there anything you have access to now?

Well, there are international organizations and national organizations now, so the rehab field has had to evolve with whatever laws were made. The EPA was started in the 60's, so the feds had to figure out what laws they wanted for all different things, not just wildlife rehab, but what state parks, national parks and - all these different agencies - they wanted, what their roles are and what exactly they’re supposed to be doing. I guess enough rehabbers got together, and there are resources now, and people have spent the time figuring out what works and what doesn’t, so there is more sharing than there used to be. There’s the international wildlife rehabilitation council, the national wildlife rehabilitation association, so there’s international, national, and state associations, and they collaborate with other disciplines too, like they collaborate with researchers in collages. We’re collaborating with Davis on a couple different studies that share our resources, like if we have barn owls that don’t make it, we send them to Davis because they’re doing a study on that, and the researchers help us, too. They publish studies that we can use, and then there are journals, so people share information that way.  Journals are really important. They’ll do a study and they’ll publish it, so that anybody in the field can use that information.

So the work is individual and collaborative, which is kind of cool. Each center has their own problems, like Huntington Beach, we got a lot of murres. I haven’t seen a murre here at all. It’s not a kind of thing we deal with, so like if one came into the center, I don’t know if there’s anyone there that would know what to do with it. So it has to be individualized too, because we certainly don’t get murres, and there’s no reason why they would get river otters.

If a murre came in, what would you do?

We got many seabirds there. For every animal that comes in, the most important thing is that they’re warm; the first thing is heat. You want to put them somewhere warm and let them de-stress, because stress actually leads to physical manifestations for wildlife. It’s really an issue. California towhees will break out in what we call plaque. They’re bacterial pouches all over their skin and they beat themselves against the cage, so trying to minimize stress for any wildlife is really important. Murres get something called aspergillosis, which is a fungus. You put them in a warmer climate and let them de-stress and warm up. Once their body temperature is up, because hypothermia is one thing that kills a lot of things, because if they’re cold and they feel crappy, they don’t want to fight to live, they just want to lay quietly and die, then you give them fluids, and then you evaluate what injuries they have. If we got a murre in, they would do the same thing for that animal, and depending on what the prognosis is, they might triage it.

They never release an animal back to the wild that cannot take care of itself. There are certain injuries that we know are not rehabilitable, so they humanely euthanize them, but there are some animals that we give time to get better. It really depends; there’s no specific protocol. Like, we know that humeral fractures at joints we can’t fix so anything that comes in with that would have to be euthanized. They determine what needs to be done, and either they stay in an ICU ward to receive close attention, or if they’re not that seriously injured, hopefully they can go with another animal of their kind. The murres we eventually put in a pool and make sure that they can hunt, eat, walk, move and swim well enough. Then we make sure they have no serious injuries before they can be released.

What made you want to start in this field?

I always need to be doing something, and I’m the kind of person that wants to know everything about everything. I just don’t have enough time and I mean, no one has enough time, so I like trying new things, and I’ll do something for a while and then I want to do something else, but I always do some sort of volunteering, because there’s so much in the world that needs to be done, and wildlife seems to me like one of the most destitute things I’ve found. There is not enough time, there is not enough people, and there are not enough resources, so it’s really hard, and a lot of people burn out, and a lot of people can’t do it, but wildlife rehab is one of the most rewarding things ever because you know that without you that little bird probably would not make it. Even if it is a really crappy day and it’s been stressful, you know everybody in the room is in the same boat. They’re all there because they love it and everyone there, they love it, and they can’t stand the thought of not doing anything with so much suffering. Most of the animals that get in, their problems are human- related, so if we are going to create problems for wildlife, we should spend the time and effort trying to fix it.

What kind of human related problems?

Some of the human related problems are cat- caught baby birds, window smashed birds, and abused animals. We got a turkey in this morning that someone had shot with a BB gun and broke its leg.

When the animals are abused, is it from hunting, or how are they abused?

We don’t get domestic animals. I used to volunteer at SPCA, because I like dogs and I spent a summer working with primates at a zoo, and I do wildlife rehab.  I did dogs and cats too, so we got abuse cases in the SPCA too, and there were some that were obviously neglected by their owners. The ones that we get in the wildlife center, are just from people being nasty. It’s not necessarily hunting. We don’t get that many hunting injuries; I was kind of surprised about the turkey but in Southern California, we got in quite a few, and part of the problem is that they aren’t prosecutable. Even if you know who did it, there is no forensic evidence for an opossum. You have to have someone see the person do it.

So if someone did see someone do that, is it a crime?

It is. It’s against the law, but it’s very hard to prove. So, we had a case that the neighbor heard a dad and his kid beat up an opossum with a shovel. She heard it, she knew that it was them, but because that she didn’t actually see it, and there was no way to prove that it was really them; they couldn’t prosecute him. All they got is a slap on the wrist and a night in jail. Even if they could prosecute, there’s not serious punishment for wildlife abuse. Max, three months in jail, but most people would get out with probation. Those are the kind of people that are going to hurt humans eventually. So it’s not even just for the animals themselves but to prevent them hurting others in the future. Like a ten year old beating up an opossum with a shovel, I mean personally I think he should be punished for that. Some people don’t think that it’s worth being punished, but you know we’ll get pelicans that people snap their beaks; however, you can’t really do anything about it, which makes the rehabbers frustrated. It’s against the law, and there’s not really any enforcement.

What do you think has been your best moment in animal rehab?

Getting to release them. Because with so much stuff, the ones you can save make you remember why you’re doing it in the first place. So getting to go on releases is what volunteers look forward to. Like last year we got to go on a ducky round up. That’s the best thing ever. You have to go catch 250 ducks in this huge corral. It’s very messy and very noisy. You can only have two juvenile ducks in a container or else they’d overheat. Having to go out with ten people to round up ducks is fun and sometimes they have cool things that come in. Sometimes they do river otters; that’s fun, and little bats and raccoons.

What percent of the ones that come in survive?

Lindsay has the highest survival rate in the country. It’s about 45% but most of those are baby birds. Because we get a lot of baby birds that are otherwise healthy- cat caught, or mom’s dead, or the nest fell, we get a lot of baby birds that are mostly healthy, so that really bumps up the survival rate, but for adult birds that come in the turn out is much lower. If you can catch an adult bird, something is seriously wrong with it. Wildlife are very good at hiding injuries; it’s survival instinct; therefore, they have to be very sick before you can catch them. If they come in such bad shape then it’s hard to save them. So out of those I don’t know if we even save a third, because a lot of those can’t be saved. About 50% survive, which is actually pretty high for rehab. Some rehab centers consider 20-30% good.

Why do you think the survival rate is so high?

We have the museum, so the museum has people coming to pay to visit the non-releasable animals so they have a lot more money and resources. For example, Lindsay has a full-time veterinarian, a part-time veterinarian, and several paid staff members, whereas at the rehab center in Southern California, I was there for over a year and I never saw the vet. No one can pay him to do it, so they would take the bad animals to him at his practice because he was a dog and cat vet, but they didn’t have any veterinary care. They had one technician, and thousands of volunteers. They had one paid person, there’s not really enough money for training, so Lindsay is kind of unique of the country because they can afford stuff. We use medications that your vet wouldn’t use, because we have to use what we have, and we use stuff that is outdated, and we can’t do certain things because it costs too much so, we can’t do everything that someone that you would pay would do. They have more money, so it’s easier to save things if you have more resources to use on them.

Do you think in the future the government will give more money to wildlife rehab?

Probably not. It’s not really a high priority especially with the budget crisis. They’ve cut a lot of programs to begin with, like Mt Diablo State Park is probably going to close. Maybe they will; I hope they do because I think it’s important to boost the populations before they crash, and there’re certain animals that they’ve put a lot of resources into like bolstering eagle populations, and now we have bald eagles again but there’s no blanket program to give wildlife centers money. I mean you can ask for grants, but really it’s donations from the public, whatever the centers can raise themselves. I don’t think there’s any government grants that they give.

Does the whole thing run off of public donations?

Pretty much. They do ask for grants, but I don’t do fundraising, so I don’t know where they get their money, but its mostly public support.

Why are you going back to vet school and what are your plans for the future?

I always wanted to be a veterinarian. I don’t really know what kind yet, but I want to be a surgeon. Otherwise I would get bored. I can’t be an office person of any kind; I have to be on my feet doing something and I always wanted to be a vet since I was five; so even though I do other stuff, like theater, mock trial, painting, sewing, and a lot of other things, I always wanted to be a vet. That is why I always had to do something animal-related. I mean, wouldn’t you die to go play with monkeys for a summer? I got to sleep on my sister’s couch and go hang out with monkeys all day. It’s great. So I want to be a surgeon but I may not get in to the program, because vet school has a 10% acceptance rate and only 2% can be surgeons. So I want to be a soft-tissue, small animal surgeon and part time wildlife or zoo vet, because I like working with all different types of animals. I’d get bored if it were just dogs and cats all the time. Doing that for 34 years? I’d get bored. So I want to keep my hands in everything, and I’d probably have to be a surgeon in order to afford to be a wildlife vet. I couldn’t do it full time because they don’t get paid enough. It’s not that I care about money, but I need enough money for a house and kids. Like working at Portland Zoo, their vet worked 65 hours a week and he’d get sixty grand a year. That’s not much for a professional. He worked his butt off for hardly anything, and you can’t have a family if you’re going to work that hard. Dr. Nancy at Lindsay, I don’t even know how much she gets paid, probably not very much, because they can’t afford to pay very much so, I’d probably have to be a surgeon or something in order to spend several days a week giving my services away. There’re only six wildlife rehab centers in the country that can afford a full-time veterinarian, so six out of 350 centers, there’re very little resources to afford veterinary care so, I probably wouldn’t be able to be paid for it so, I’d have to be a volunteer, but I want to help as much as I can.

You have to recognize that there are so many different people that go into it. There are so many different roles, so many different experience levels. You have people that only do raptors, you have people that specialize in birds, volunteers that do the laundry and wash the dishes. Some people want to do that because they want to be involved with animals but they don’t actually want to work with them. There’s room for all kinds of people but it takes a lot of people. For each animal that walks through the hospital, probably 20 people work on him or her. Therefore, it’s a lot of collaboration.

So what would you recommend to people who want to help wildlife?

To get involved and not be discouraged by how hard it its. People like to help as much as possible, and there are lots of ways to help. It helps to figure out what exactly they’re comfortable with doing first so that they find the role that’s best for them rather than just throwing themselves in headfirst. Like I said, there are some people who want to be involved, but they only answer the phones. So, take classes and volunteer. There are also people who work on the museum side, so they are more like keepers than rehabilitators. It’s a hospital and a museum. They’re connected but really two different things. Long-term care for something you’re going to keep there its entire life is different than something you want to keep wild and get in and out as soon as possible.

Why do they keep some animals for their whole life span instead of releasing them back into the wild?

We try and find places for animals like wildlife centers that have room for them that can’t take care of themselves, otherwise they have to be euthanized.
Animals that we have at the museum also have to be people-friendly. You don’t want to put an animal there that captivity doesn’t suit. They are wild, so the staff have to make sure the eagles are okay being close to other birds and are okay with people being around, but if they weren’t, they wouldn’t stay there and there’re some animals we can’t rehab because they can’t handle captivity. For example adult deer cannot be rehabbed at all because they would stress themselves silly and hurt themselves. They would just freak out the entire time, so you do not want to cause suffering. We have a red-shouldered hawk at Lindsay that’s missing a wing. Each one has a different problem, like an opossum that’s blind. If the injury is causing suffering then we don’t want to keep them alive. If they aren’t suffering, they’re okay in captivity and they’re okay around people, then we try to find homes for them.

Is that where the animals in zoos come from?

Zoos have changed too since the sixties. Because for the longest time all the animals you see in zoos had been caught in the wild. They try very hard now not to have to catch animals in the wild, and they have something called the pecies protection plan where zookeepers in the entire country, and I think all of North America, have a species protection plan for each species that zoos have, so that they keep track of genetics. Out of all the zoos, there may only be fifty of this animal. Fifty is a very small population; you don’t want to have inbreeding. That will cause problems and genetic dilution, so they have people that have to figure out and keep track of where different animals came from so they can share between zoos, and too keep the population viable. There’re some animals that only exist in zoos because they’ve gone extinct in the wild, so there are a couple of animals like the California Condor. The Portland Zoo had three conservation programs, and one was the California Condor. There were only six in the wild in 1990. They actually gathered up all of them, and then they had to breed them up, and now they’ve released some back into the wild and I think the population’s up to ninety. They’re still really threatened and they’re still in the breeding program, but they are doing better now. That’s another function of zoos that most people don’t know about.

How does the breeding program work?

It depends on the species. Zoos have to collaborate, and you want successful breeding programs so you won’t have to take animals from the wild. First, you find a suitable match, based on age and genetics. Someone looks at a piece of paper and says, “this ocelot in Sacramento is a perfect match for this one in D.C.” So they have to send it to the Sacramento Zoo, and if they don’t get along, they have to find someone else to mate with that animal. It’s important to make sure the populations stay viable, so if the populations in the wild crash we have enough in zoos that we can actually have a wild population. It’s becoming more and more important as animals become more threatened. Like orangutans, there used to be 300,000, but the popular is down 5,000 a year, because they don’t breed very often in the wild and their habitat is disappearing so fast. They’re clear-cutting the forest, and I think they’re making rubber or sugar plantation there instead. Their population has dropped five thousand a year for ten years, and they only have one or two offspring in a lifetime and they live fifty years, so they might only have an offspring every ten years, so the population doesn’t recover very fast. It went from 300,000 down to 150,000, so zoos are trying to plan for that population because they know their becoming threatened. There’s actually a place in Santa Rosa, Safari West, that has this specific kind of antelopes that have actually become extinct in the wild, and there’re none of them left, and there’re some in Santa Rosa where a guy started a breeding program to try to build up the population enough so they can re-introduce them. In conclusion, zoos have an important part in conservation. Portland had three conservation programs for native wildlife: the Western Palm Turtle, Pygmy Rabbits, and the California Condor.

With this, our interview with Rebecca concluded. We both thought Rebecca’s experience was enough to inspire anyone to consider pursuing a career with animals. If you think you might like to care for otters or hang out with lemurs (and really, who wouldn’t), check out the following links:

http://www.wildlife-museum.org/programs/programs.php -programs at the Lindsay Wildlife Museum

http://www.aspca.org/adoption/shelters/ - volunteer at an animal shelter near you

http://www.oaklandzoo.org/support-the-zoo/volunteer-opportunities/ - opportunities at the Oakland zoo

http://www.sfzoo.org/openrosters/ViewOrgPageLink.asp?LinkKey=14314&orgkey=1905 – volunteer at the San Francisco Zoo

Finally, a big thanks to Rebecca Smith for answering all our questions, and we wish her luck at Davis this fall!

- Jessie Kathan and Sophie Barrett