The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation issued new rules at the beginning of this year for wildlife rehabilitators, drastically limiting their ability to care for injured adult white-tailed deer and placing some — less dramatic — restrictions on their ability to care for orphaned fawns.

The DEC says the purpose of wildlife rehabilitation is to treat injured animals so they can be returned to the wild, not to keep them for extended stays or treat them as pets.

Kelly Martin of Berne, a rehabilitator who has been caring for injured wildlife for three decades, writes in a letter to The Enterprise this week, “We want equal protection for all species of wildlife.”

She also noted in an interview that the agency will be issuing the rules for wildlife rehabilitator licensing again in January 2017 and said, “We have no idea what they’re going to do. They haven’t given us any indication whether all the letters we have written, trying to get them to work with us, have made any difference, and whether there will be any changes from what they gave us last year.”

Martin, who is president of the New York State Wildlife Rehabilitation Council, is bringing one of two lawsuits by rehabilitators against the DEC about the regulations.

Rehabbers, who must be licensed by the DEC and have their license renewed every five years, work as volunteers. Many people, police, and veterinarians call a rehabilitator when a deer or other wild animal is injured in a car crash, entangled in a fence, trapped in an abandoned well, etc.

In the past, rehabbers were able to take in an injured animal, in hopes of being able to rehabilitate it and release it back into the wild. In the case of fawns in particular, Martin said, it has been standard practice to keep them over the winter and release them the following spring.

Depending on its injury, an adult deer often needs this amount of time as well, she said. It is standard practice, Martin said, to have only minimal contact with recovering animals, providing them with medical care as needed, and then only with “food and water and leaving them alone,” Martin said.

One essential element in preventing fawns from becoming habituated, Martin said, is the use of surrogate adult deer to show young deer how to be deer, to model normal behavior. But rehabbers are no longer allowed to keep any adult deer on a permanent basis, including surrogates, she said.

Under the new rules, rehabbers can take in an injured adult deer only on the understanding that they will have it in their possession for no more than 48 hours, at which time it must either be released or euthanized.

Martin says that the new regulations are “not fair or humane” and that they were implemented without any input from the regulated community, rehabbers themselves.

In addition to applying for a new license every five years, rehabilitators must also submit an annual log to the DEC, telling them “what we have, where we got it, and what ends up happening to it,” Martin said.

The DEC rationale

State-level representatives of the DEC were unwilling to speak to The Enterprise by phone, but did email a statement briefly outlining the agency’s position.

“DEC for the last two years, has been concerned about the effectiveness of rehabilitation of big game animals and their return to the wild, especially adult deer,” said the email to The Enterprise; public information officer Benning DeLaMater said the statement came from the agency’s wildlife licensing unit.

“As part of this routine license review and update of the license conditions,” the statement continued, “DEC clarified that the purpose of wildlife rehabilitation is to treat injured animals so they can be returned to the wild. Wildlife rehabilitators should not have any animals in their possession long-term, or treat these animals as pets. The harboring of big game for non-rehabilitative purposes was just one factor, but not necessarily the basis for the changes.”

The purpose of wildlife rehabilitation, the agency wrote, is to treat injured animals so they can be returned to the wild.

The DEC noted that the biggest change in the rules was “the prohibition on rehabilitation of adult deer” — as well as of adult bear and moose — and the specification of timeframes for rehabilitation of fawns, as well as of bear cubs and moose calves.

In instances where a rehabilitator cannot help an injured animal, or when an animal is injured to the point that it cannot be returned to the wild, it should be humanely euthanized, the DEC wrote.

New DEC rules

The new rules, issued at the start of the year, prohibited taking in any adult deer, ever.

Rehabbers could take in orphaned or injured fawns, but fawns could only be held between April 15 through Sept. 15, and needed to be released no further than 20 miles from where they were found.

The rules were modified slightly in June 2016, in response to rehabbers’ complaints.

Now rehabbers are allowed to take in and care for adult deer, but only for a maximum of 48 hours. The rules now say, “Within 48 hours of taking possession of an adult white-tailed deer the licensee shall either release or euthanize the white-tailed deer.”

The DEC also removed the 20-mile rule on fawns, which rehabbers had called a hardship and unrealistic, since rehabbers are few and far between, Martin said, and often more than 20 miles away.

Finally, rehabbers are to tag the ear of any deer that has been rehabilitated and received any drug treatment with a tag that reads, “Do not consume.”

Response from rehabbers

The new rules came as a complete surprise to long-time licensed rehabbers including Martin. And since the change, Martin says, rehabbers have been frustrated by the DEC’s unwillingness to discuss the rules and their “lack of transparency” about their reasons for the changes.

Martin has been licensed since 1981, not long after the DEC first began issuing licenses for this work.

The new regulations are the conditions for wildlife rehabbers’ licensing, and violating them can mean a revoked license.  

Forty-eight hours is nowhere near long enough to rehab a wounded animal, in most cases, Martin said. It would be long enough only for a deer that had been bumped by a car and stunned.

Many of the deer that she and others have rehabbed in the past have had injuries that were recoverable, she said, such as a broken leg or even more than one broken leg. After overwintering, these deer were released in spring and had several months in the wild, to get stronger, before the start of hunting season.

The release date of Sept. 15 for fawns now means that they must be sent back into the woods close to the start of hunting season, unless a rehabilitator is granted a special extension. Martin says that, in many cases, keeping fawns over the winter gives them the best chance of survival.

The DEC’s “Management Plan for White-tailed Deer in New York State 2012-2016,” published in Oct. 2011, states that the agency will work with “stakeholders in the wildlife rehabilitation community to assess current rehabilitation practices for deer, and take appropriate measures to ensure that such practices are effective, ensure public safety, and do not pose a threat to the wild deer population.” This plan was created by the Big Game Management Team, Bureau of Wildlife, Division of Fish, Wildlife & Marine Resources, the same entity that created the new wildlife rehabilitator regulations that took effect at the start of 2016.

Martin told The Enterprise that she could not understand why the rules were suddenly changed, without any input from rehabilitators. She called the situation “not only depressing but very frustrating, primarily because I don’t see that there were a huge number of problems that had to be solved.”

Over the last few years, Martin said, a couple of the 1,400 rehabbers in New York State wound up making deer overly tame and unfit for release back into the wild, she said.

Martin said that the rehabilitators involved in those cases lost their license, “which seems OK to me.” If some individuals were violating license conditions, then punish those few, she said. “But don’t punish all for the actions of a few.”

She noted that the entity that oversees wildlife rehabbers is the same one that oversees hunting regulations, licenses, and seasons. “If someone poaches a deer, they don’t modify every sportsman’s license because of it,” said Martin.

Martin suggested that the DEC’s new regulations have created problems that the agency has solved with additional regulations. In the past, deer were overwintered and released in the spring, long before hunting season, and any drugs in their system would have long since have dissipated, she said. Being forced to release them just before hunting season raises the possibility, she said, of a hunter consuming an animal that has been treated with drugs; hence the need for ear tags.

The other rehabber who is suing the DEC separately is Virginia Frati, executive director of the Evelyn Alexander Wildlife Rescue Center in Hampton Bays on Long Island.

Frati says that the DEC is no longer answering calls or responding to letters from wildlife rehabilitators. She noted that representatives of the agency have suggested to her that the longer deer are held, the greater the chance of their habituation and their becoming a danger to the public.

“But it’s our contention that adult deer can never be tamed or habituated,” Frati said. “And if they are so concerned about that, why do they let us do fawns?”

For many people, including in the DEC, said Frati, these animals are considered “nuisance animals,” and the attitude is, “‘Why bother?’”

She suggested that some in the DEC consider the work of rehabilitators to be pointless, since animals may not survive their injuries, or may be killed by hunters after their release.

Once, when she was speaking on the phone with the director of one department within the DEC, Frati said, she could hear the woman snickering.

“I think they think it’s ridiculous,” Frati said. “They picture a bunch of backyard people shoving bottles in their (deer’s) mouths, having them in bed watching TV with us. They don’t realize we take this really seriously, and how much vet care we put into these animals.”

Martin says the reason that the role of wildlife rehabilitator was created in the first place, three decades ago, was to “take these animals out of the hands of the public, and to treat them humanely.”

If rehabilitators are unable, legally, to help wildlife, people will not simply let them die, Martin said; she predicts that they will take them in, themselves, and try to nurse them back to health.

She called the new regulations counterproductive, saying of injured wildlife, “When they’re in the hands of the public, DEC has no control over how they are handled or what diseases they have.”

Martin thinks that the DEC should make rehabilitators “more partners” and allow them to play a proactive role in, for instance, disease monitoring. “We pretty much are on the front lines,” she said. “We take in sick and injured wildlife. If there’s something going on with a population, we’ll be the first ones to see it.”

Points of contention

Martin agrees with the DEC’s idea of what should be done with animals that cannot be helped, but disagrees with its assessment of how long rehabilitation should be expected to take.

She also disagrees with the idea that any animal that cannot be returned to the wild should be euthanized. To date, many animals that could not be returned to the wild have, for many years, been used in education, Martin said.