ANIMAL PEOPLE is the leading independent newspaper providing original investigative coverage of animal protection worldwide. Founded in 1992, ANIMAL PEOPLE has no alignment or affiliation with any other entity.

 

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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: November 2006

Who photographed those bunnies, the fox, and the raccoon?

 

WESTON, Ct.--While mainstream humane societies have mostly left wildlife issues to nature centers and state wildlife agencies, individual rehabilitators have gradually built a network of independent institutions dedicated to extending the humane ethic to wild animals. Often they work almost in the shadows of the mainstream organizations that didn't do the job.

Wildlife In Crisis, of Weston, Connecticut, whose photos appear on pages 1 and 12, operates within the territory served by the Connecticut Humane Society since 1881 and the Connecticut Audubon Society since 1898. Not part of the National Audubon Society, Conn-ecticut Audubon now operates a statewide string of 19 wildlife sanctuaries and six nature centers, and does rehabilitation of rare species.

Yet as of 1989 the region lacked agencies to care for orphaned and injured wildlife of common species, when Dara Reid founded Wildlife In Crisis to fill the gap.

Within a year Wildlife In Crisis inherited the home on wooded acreage that it has occupied ever since, adding facilities as needed.

But the young organization was almost immediately challenged when the mid-Atlantic raccoon rabies pandemic hit southern Connecticut. Spreading north from West Virginia, the pandemic started in 1976, after coonhunters trying to rebuild the trapped-out local population released a truckload of infected raccoons from Florida. Wildlife agencies tried to fight the pandemic by urging hunters and trappers to kill more raccoons, which caused surviving raccoons in the latent phase of rabies to wander farther, seeking mates, accelerating the spread.

Coping with public panic, Reid estimates that she handled as many as 10,000 calls in 1991, and perhaps as many in each subsequent year, as the reputation of Wildlife In Crisis spread.

The most recent hot issue keeping the Wildlife In Crisis telephones busy has been the effort of the United Illuminating Company to exterminate feral monk parakeets who persist in building nests on power poles. The situation was featured on page 1 on the March 2006 edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE. Reid was prominent in making the killing a public issue.

Despite Reid's efforts, and those of many others, including national publicity generated by Friends of Animals, United Illuminating hired USDA Wildlife Services to kill 179 monk parakeets in 2005, and destroyed their nests. The killing and nest-smashing proved predictably futile, as the parakeets rebuilt nests on 76 poles. Each nest houses a colony of up to 40 birds.

Judge Trial Referee David W. Skolnick in early October 2006 ruled on behalf of Friends of Animals that United Illuminating has not made adequate efforts to discourage monk parakeet nesting, short of killing parakeets. As alternatives exist, Skolnick wrote, "The defendant's failure to implement these measures is likely to cause the unnecessary destruction of monk parakeets, unnecessary harm to other species of wildlife, and impairment of the public trust in the ability of the state to protect its natural resources."

United Illuminating representative Albert Carbone said that this year the company would demolish nests without killing birds.