Wildlife rehabilitation helps injured and orphaned animals return to the wild. Understanding best practices prevents well-intentioned interventions from causing additional harm.
Wildlife rehabilitation occupies a challenging welfare space. When done well, it returns injured and orphaned animals to wild life. When done poorly, it creates animals that are unable to survive in the wild, are imprinted on humans, or carry disease that threatens wild populations. Best practice in wildlife rehabilitation minimizes human imprinting through limited handling and conspecific socialization; uses pre-release conditioning to restore wild survival behaviors; and honestly assesses whether individual animals are genuinely releasable. The hardest ethical decision in rehabilitation is recognizing when euthanasia is the most welfare-positive outcome for an animal that cannot be returned to a reasonable quality of life in the wild.