To the Editor:

As president of the New York State Wildlife Rehabilitation Council, I am disheartened by the reigning attitude from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s Bureau of Wildlife that discounts interests in wildlife differing from traditional “uses” of wildlife, namely hunting, fishing, trapping.

I am not proffering an “anti” position on those activities. Rather, I am asking that different interests be given an equal voice.

This year, DEC’s Big Game Team imposed restrictions on licensed wildlife rehabilitators, limiting our ability to offer humane care for certain species, like deer, bear, moose, with the greatest impact falling on deer. DEC did this with no input from the regulated community and the agency offers no alternative other than to leave an animal to suffer.

The Bureau of Wildlife met with Wildlife Rehabilitation Council members over the new conditions and the DEC stated that it will not advise staff to respond to calls about injured adult deer or orphaned fawns.

Some concessions were made, some of which the Wildlife Rehabilitation Council supports; however, the DEC lied in a letter to licensed wildlife rehabilitators, stating that the rehabilitation council agreed with one condition that we strongly oppose. That condition states that adult injured deer must either be released or euthanized within 48 hours.

This would have left the deer fished out of the Mohawk in January to die of hypothermia because no one would have been able to legally care for that animal. Fortunately for that one animal, licensed wildlife rehabilitators had not yet received the new conditions and the deer was released in the spring.

For over 30 years, the Wildlife Rehabilitation Council worked with the DEC to develop a wildlife rehabilitation program that was envied across the country. No more, with our once cooperative relationship now adversarial at best.

Licensed wildlife rehabilitators are mainly volunteers providing care for sick, injured, orphaned, and displaced wildlife. Our goal is to return healthy animals to the wild.

A large percentage of the wildlife we see are victims of human-caused problems: vehicle collisions, lawn mowers, hay balers, barbed wire, cats, dogs, window collisions, toxins and poisons, fishing-line entanglements, logging, and sometimes unnecessary human interference. The public looks to wildlife rehabilitators, not the DEC, to provide this humane service.

There are caring regional DEC employees and conservation officers who work with wildlife rehabilitators to aid wildlife in distress. We are ever so grateful for their help. However, there is callous and uncaring leadership from the central office of the Bureau of Wildlife. Little was done by the DEC to charge youths who purposefully and inhumanely clubbed porcupines to death, an annual ongoing occurrence that has been happening for years. Little was done when a woodchuck was intentionally run over and killed by police officers in a golf cart.

Those in charge of protecting all our natural resources are rather selective in what gets protection. We want fair and equal treatment and we want equal protection for all species of wildlife.

Kelly Martin

Berne

Editor’s note: See related story.