Wildlife rehabilitation provides care for injured and orphaned wild animals. Understanding what effective rehabilitation looks like supports better outcomes for individual animals and populations.
Wildlife rehabilitation involves significant ethical complexity. The decision to rehabilitate versus euthanize depends on prognosis, suffering during treatment, and realistic assessment of post-release survival. Prolonged treatment of animals with poor prognoses may cause more suffering than timely euthanasia. Effective rehabilitation minimizes human contact, maximizes species-appropriate behavior, and results in animals capable of surviving independently. The welfare standard is not merely survival to release, but release to a life worth living.