That's great. Thanks very much indeed, Paul and good evening, everybody. Thank you for being here.
So decision making in British wildlife. So to start off with what we're talking about here is wildlife rehabilitation. And wildlife rehabilitation is defined by the IWRC as the treatment and temporary care of injured, diseased and displaced indigenous animals and the subsequent release of healthy animals to appropriate habitats.
There's quite a few key words in there. That suggests that what we're doing is not about keeping animals in long term captivity. It's not about zoo animals or exotic pets.
It's about taking native wild animals from the wild and getting them into a fit state to be able to lead normal lives back in the wild. And if we look at an outcome-based flow chart for wildlife casualties, we'll see that quite soon after we've caught them, we have the option to either put them to sleep if they're severely injured or provide some sort of first aid. After first aid, they need to be reassessed, and again, we have that decision making of do we need to put them to sleep or are we able to go on and treat them?
And having decided to move into the treatment phase, really there's only one outcome we want at this point, which is to rehabilitate them, get them fit to go back to the wild. Permanent captivity, particularly in the UK, is, is rarely acceptable, and I'll, I'll explain why as we go through this webinar, and we would hope we wouldn't be euthanizing many animals, once we've gone into a treatment phase. Really, we want most of our euthanasia decisions to be made within the 1st 24 to 48 hours.
So why might we as vets and nurses get involved in treating wildlife? And there's a whole variety of reasons, that sort of come up on an international basis, and some of them really relate to the UK. Perhaps things like conservation do less so, but things like education, which is cited as the second main reason why wildlife rehabilitators do this, is just as important to the UK as it would be for, anywhere else in the world.
For a lot of us, probably the reason we do it is about addressing, the negative impacts of mankind on our wildlife. So I think we can all accept that wild animals might naturally die, but there's a lot of stuff that we do as human beings that have negative impact and there's Some examples here in badgers. So we've got a badger with some nice green faeces being passed because of mentality had exposure, and we've got an RTA and a badger that's been caught, in two places in, in a snare which has been illegally set.
So these are the sorts of things we might like to impact on us as a wildlife vets. The other reason for a lot of people is that we have a legal and professional responsibility to look after animals. And when we all qualify as vets and nurses, we make this declaration, and it says our constant endeavour will be to ensure the health and welfare of animals are committed into our care, and that includes, our native wildlife species.
Wildlife is fully included under the Veterinary Surgeons Act and the veterinary medicines regulations, which means that only veterinary surgeons can diagnose, prescribe, and treat, and that comes as a surprise to some wildlife rehabilitators. The RCPS guide for professional conduct also fully applies to wildlife, so all vets have to provide first aid and emergency care, including euthanasia. We need to remember that that responsibility begins with the first contact.
So a client who phoned you up to say that they've hit a deer on the road, you're then responsible for that. It might mean you don't go out. It might mean you call somebody to shoot the deer if that's appropriate.
You call another vet, but you need to take responsibility for that, call from, from the minute it happens. In most instances for us to prescribe, we need to also have examined the animal. So there are some exceptions to that, which includes writing SOPs for wildlife centres so they can immediately provide some first aid, care.
Schedule 3, which obviously affects owners and affects veterinary nurses, also applies that to wildlife as well. And if we speak specifically about a veterinary nurse and hopefully there's some veterinary nurses listening this evening, it's just the same as it is for other species. The wild animal needs to be under the care of the vet.
The medical, treatments, minor surgery needs to be carried out to the vet's direction or supervision. And as a veterinary nurse, you need to either be working for that vet or working for somewhere like a wildlife centre that the vet's acting on behalf of. So there needs to be a relationship between vet and nurse there.
The veterinary surgeon also needs to be satisfied that the veterinary nurse can carry out the treatment or surgery, and that's where some difficulty arises because British wildlife isn't included in RVM training and therefore it's quite hard for vets to be sure veterinary nurses can do this and certainly through, BSABA and we webinars like this, we're trying to develop some training so RVNs are able to say, yeah, you know, I have done this wildlife training and therefore I'm, I'm fine to, to do this. When it comes to payments that emergency care, which can be an issue for some vets, wildlife falls under this BVN RSPCA memorandum of understanding. It's been agreed that the small wild animals and under 1 kg is, is what the definition is, that during the day, vets treat these animals free of charge.
Out of hours for larger animals over 1 kg, it's possible to get a log number in the same way you would for dogs and cats. So that same RSPCA procedure of having prior knowledge and then authorization. And so it's worth remembering if during the day larger animals every 1 kg come into you, you can phone and get that long number or get the finder to, sort out that prior knowledge for you.
However, if you don't sign up to the BPA RSPCA memorandum of understanding, you still have to treat wildlife because it falls under the RCBS codes of conduct. You still have to be providing that emergency care and and first aid. As well as our veterinary legislation, there's also some other legislation that affects wildlife in the UK.
And the wildlife legislation is largely about protecting animals when they're in the wild as opposed to when they're in captivity. And our main pieces of wildlife legislation are the Wildlife and Countryside Act and the species-specific tax, so things like the Protection of Badgers Act, the deer Act, the seal Act, which gives some added protection to certain species. Excuse me.
UK wildlife law also currently covers European, legislation and international legislation like CITES. And the idea of the wildlife legislation is largely to protect animals from being taken from the wild, from them being killed, kept in captivity, and having their habitats and nesting sites disturbed or interfered with or or permanently. There's some additional considerations that we need to think about.
Some animals we need a licence to keep them in captivity. So these include the schedule for for birds of prey. So these are things like ospreys, white-tailed eagles, golden eagles, which if we start keeping them for more than 2 weeks, we need to have a licence.
So we need to think about that if you were to do that at your veterinary practise, but certainly you also need to remember that wildlife rehabilitators need to do that as well. We also have some licencing around grey squirrels and other non-indigenous species. And if you have things like adders brought in for more than initial care, then you need to think about having a DWA, so a dangerous wild animal licence in order to be able to keep them.
It's a non-indigenous species, so these are the ones that are listed under Schedule 9 of the wildlife in Countryside Act. There's some that you can't release like mink, and there's others that currently in certain parts of England and Wales, you can get a licence to both keep in captivity and released back to the wild because they're not having a negative impact on native species like the red squirrels in those parts of the country. This is unfortunately likely to change from the 29th of March when we bring in these EU regulations on invasive alien species, and you might have seen some stuff in the veterinary press about this, but it looks like, come the end of March, we're probably going to not be able to keep and release these squirrels independent of where we are in the UK.
Some animals also need licences to mark them, and that particularly is badgers. So if you want to microchip a badger or put a little bit of Tippex on a badger cub to differentiate it from its friends in a group of badger cubs, you need a licence to do that, and they're really easy to get from natural England or the devolved equivalent. So when it comes to treating wildlife as vets and nurses, veterinary care is generally exempt from taking and keeping.
So if an animal's injured, you're allowed to bring it into captivity under the Wildlife and Countryside Act, providing you're intending releasing it back to the wild. Under some small poaching legislation, the finder may legally be considered to be the owner. So it's worth having the animals signed over to you so that the new owner in inverted commas doesn't complain when you euthanize that animal because it's not fit to go back to the wild.
So having a wildlife admission form like the one here, is a really useful, thing to do. It's also quite useful for wildlife centre. I have the animals signed over because they then have ownership and as owners under Schedule 3 of the veterinary surgeons Act, they're allowed to treat animals as in give them injections of medication.
So if wildlife centres effectively own the animal, then they're just like somebody with a diabetic cat who's allowed to give medication to their their own pet. So that's a really sensible thing to do on, on both sides. Medicines controlled by the veterinary medicines regulations and BMD, so it's important that medicines stored correctly, it's prescribed correctly by veterinary surgeons, and that it's used correctly by wildlife rehab centres.
What about regulation of wildlife rehab in the UK? Well, we're actually fairly poor compared with an awful lot of the world. In other European countries like Ireland, there's some statutory framework and certainly when we get to North America, South Africa, the Antipodes.
Wildlife, is, it's got much, much more protection in terms of who can bring it into captivity and treat and look after it. So in the UK if you decide to set yourself up as a hedgehog rehabilitator, you can just do that tomorrow and that would be absolutely fine. The argument for that, I guess, is that our other legislation, in particularly the Animal Welfare Act protects all animals when they're in captivity.
So that means that if you start keeping your hedgehogs in a way that's not appropriate, you're keeping them without the intention of sing them back to the wild, then that would become a problem. But it does mean there's considerable variation in rehabilitation facilities, standards and the degree of veterinary involvement in centres. And I'm sure some of you will see that as you work as vets and vet nurses.
So the animal welfare legislation in the UK is about protecting wildlife when it's in captivity, and that's the Animal Welfare Act in England and Wales and similar acts in Scotland and Northern Ireland. And this applies to all animals in captivity, be it dogs, cats, or cattle, or wildlife, and that's about prevention of harm, and promotion of welfare for those animals. Now I'm assured that you'll all be aware that within the Animal Welfare Act we have the 5 needs embedded.
And the five needs have come from the five freedoms that were developed by the Farm Animal welfare council back in the late 70s. And these are about providing animals with food and water, adequate pain relief, having an ability to express normal behaviour, protecting them from fear and distress, and they're enforceable in law. As the 5 needs in the Animal Welfare Act.
And if we think about these for wildlife casualties, it's actually very difficult to fulfil the five needs at all times because when we're taking an animal from the wild and keeping it in captivity, by definition, we're going to be breaking some of these. So we need to have these at the back of our minds at all times when we're dealing with our wildlife casualties. So it's possible for the welfare of wildlife casualty to be compromised at capture.
So we'll have all perhaps gone to try and catch a seagull with a damaged wing and found that we cause it to flap around even more and and create more damage to that fracture site. We might approach. A banter at the roadside and realise it's not actually as debilitated as it appears, and it then runs into the road and gets hit by the next truck.
So there are lots of things that we can do simply putting a bird in a white wire cage can cause damage to feathering. So we need to be really careful about our capture techniques. During captivity, as I've said, we need to be constantly thinking about the five needs and whether we're appropriately fulfilling those and really whether it's appropriate to keep that animal in captivity for as long as we are doing.
And we can particularly compromise welfare upon release. I think probably most wildlife rehabilitators don't think about this enough, and I think probably as vets, we don't either, that we're all happy to just release the animal back to the wild and think we've done a good job of getting it to that stage. But actually, if it then slowly.
Dies over the next days or weeks, we're actually doing it much more harm than good, and it's really important that we remember that and where possible, we try and building some post release monitoring. So we've got some sort of assessment of how successful our car has been in captivity. It might be that you can't fulfil welfare at every stage of that journey for an animal.
So it might be you've got the facilities to look after the animal for its veterinary care, but you've not got rehabilitation facilities. So you haven't got flight cages or big ponds or whatever that would take. So it might be that you need to be moving the animal between centres as part of that journey.
So having said that we don't have any regulation in the UK, there have been some attempts at informal standards, and all of these are free online for you to download and if you just Google them, you'll find them. So the British Wildlife Rehabilitation Council, which is an umbrella organisation for wildlife rehabilitation, has some really lovely guidelines for wildlife rehab units, as well as some other free resources on its website. In 2016, we we produced some BPZS good practise guidelines for wildlife rehabilitation centres.
And these are really a wildlife spin on the zoo licencing guidelines and they include quite a lot on who can prescribe and how vets should prescribe for wildlife. So that's really useful if you're working with wildlife centre, that's worth reading just to make sure you prescribing's OK. And last year I worked with DEFRA to produce some guidelines specifically on badger rehabilitation and release.
And as you would imagine, those contain quite a lot on how we manage both and tuberculosis in a rehab situation. And again, those are free, they're on the DeA TB hub. So when we think about the welfare of the individual animal, that really wants to be at the centre of every thing we're doing.
And we want to be trying to avoid unnecessary suffering through trying to extend these animals' life beyond what could be considered natural. We need to avoid that stress of captivity, and we need to think about that animal's welfare upon release, as well as that of other populations. So for example, if we're releasing foxes with mange or badges with TB, is that appropriate?
Is it going to have an effect on that population of that species, but also potentially other populations in the case of of TB? But the welfare of the individual casualty needs to be our overriding consideration at all stages. And of course as vets, we have that choice of whether we euthanize animals or treat them.
And the way we make the decision between euthanasia and treatment for wildlife, that process we refer to as as triage. So wildlife triage, we might have some true triage situations. So the sorts of things you'd think about, you know, if you're working as a medic and there was a terrorist attack or a multi, car pileup or something where you've got lots of casualties.
It's about deciding which ones have priority. So we see that with wildlife in mass cetacean strandings, in bushfire events and in pollution events where we're having to quite quickly try and decide which animals just need to put to sleep, and which animals are are treatable. The wildlife rehabilitators when they talk about triage are not meaning that they've got loads and loads of casualties and they don't have enough resources.
It's about that individual animal and whether that animal should be treated or put to sleep. We're aiming to make that decision as close to admission as possible so the animal doesn't have a protracted amount of time in captivity to then be euthanized. And what I'd like to take home from this evening is not all the factors determining wildlife triage or medical ones that not all about your ability to provide veterinary care.
So if we go back to my sort of wildlife flow chart, and we think about when would we triage, we really want to be triaging pretty much as the animals presented to us and using that triage to decide whether we treat with some first aid. Or whether we euthanize the animal and then we want to do a secondary triage after that first aid. We're hoping we don't need to be making triage decisions later on because we've already made our decisions to take the animals through the process once we embark on treatment.
And what do we need to make everything successful? Well, we need to have a suitable casualty, appropriate veterinary care, suitable rehab and release facilities, but it also needs to be the right time of year, and we need to think about some legal things. So a suitable casualties is one that can go back to the wild in a state of physical condition that lets it survive in a similar way to any other member of its species.
So it doesn't need to be perfect, but it doesn't want to be put at a disadvantage as a result of its injuries or as a result of being in your care. So it needs to be able to move OK, defend its territory, feed itself, and reproduce in a normal manner. And I always include reproduction in there because I think that we don't know enough about how being able to reproduce affects social status in a lot of animals.
And also, if we're releasing an animal that isn't able to reproduce, it's taking up the niche of an animal that could, and I don't really think we should be sort of messing with things in that way. So in order to make those decisions, you're gonna need to know something about biology and ecology of that species. There's obviously loads of good books about that, but the BSAVA wildlife Manual at the beginning of every chapter, there's a bit about biology and ecology to try and help guide you here.
So most of our triage decisions are are veterinary ones. They are about how injured is the animal and that examination will allow us to make that decision. Some triage decisions can be made by wildlife rehabilitators and providers we have provided them with some carefully worded SOPs as as vets.
Some animals are obviously dying and just need to be put to sleep. Some will need immediately need proper veterinary attention. And the best way really of making your triage decision is a complete clinical examination.
You don't need all sorts of fancy tests, you just need to get the animal out of the box and look at it properly. And for welfare reasons, we want to make those triage decisions really quickly. I mean, a lot of them may made within the first few minutes, but certainly we want to be making them within the 1st 24 hours.
When we talk about adequate veterinary care, I like to think about wildlife casualties about us being performance animals, so they're racehors or racing greyhounds. They need to be pretty much 100% fit. So that means that veterinary care needs to be first rate.
And if we're doing orthopaedic surgery on these animals, you know, we need to be thinking of it in terms of it being a performance animal. We don't want our new graduate vets practising their orthopaedic surgery on our wildlife. We need to remember that our wild animals don't have the benefit of follow-up care, so they can't have a plate removed at a later date.
They can't have a course of meloxicam when they get osteoarthritis. So it's really important that when we release them, we're pretty sure they're going to be OK forever as far as the condition we've been treating is concerned. We need to think about the welfare aspects of handling and treatments, so particularly if it's going to be that every few days, the animal needs to be sedated or anaesthetized for addressing change, we need to think about the welfare effects of that.
Is that going to be appropriate? And that might be quite spec. Specific.
Some animals are much, much more adaptable to that process and others. So things like say deer will get really stressed with that repeat sort of handling some fox as well, whereas some other foxes will be a bit like dogs and just adapt to it really well. We need to think about the time in captivity and whether that's appropriate if you've got an animal that's social and territorial like a badger, how long can you keep it out of its social group, before that becomes too long.
And at all stages, we need to remember that euthanasia doesn't compromise welfare. We need to find somewhere then for suitable rehabilitation and you need to know upfront before you start treating the animal where it's going to go once you've done your veterinary care. So this means you need to have a good understanding of the rehabilitation facilities that are in your local area, which Species they can take, what experience they have of dealing with those species.
And most places won't be able to take all of the things all of the time. So you might need to have one centre that will do, say hedgehogs, but another centre that's going to take a steal or a deer. Go and have a look at your centres, see what sort of separation they've got for predator and prey, see what sort of isolation and disease control they've had.
Think about the need to get animals fully fit, so you're going to need good aviaries, like cages, pre-release pens. Does that facility have them, or are you gonna need to find a second facility to take the animals through that part of its care? We also need to be thinking at the beginning of the process about release sites.
So adults are fairly easy and they should go back exactly where they were found. And that's because we don't want to mess with diseases, genetics, territories, those sorts of things. But juvenile animals often need new.
Sites and those new sites need to be appropriate in terms of being safe, having enough food, being the right habitat. If it seems perfect, why aren't there already loads of those animals there? So is that because we've got some sort of persecution or hunting going on?
And done properly looking for new release sites is a huge job and the charity I work for actually employs somebody specifically to do this. We need to think about the weather and time of year, particularly for species that migrate, like swifts and swallows or hibernate like hedgehogs. It might be that you can't release things because the weather's just rubbish.
So does that mean that the centre just becomes jam-packed full of hedgehogs and that becomes a welfare concern? You need to think about the time of releases sometimes to do with breeding seasons. You don't want to release deer during the rot or badgers in particular territorial times of year, like February, March, October, November.
And it's really important that we think about the welfare, issues associated with having too many animals in some of these rescue centres at certain times of year, and I think pet dogs will be the real example of that. As I've already said, we need to think about legal things. Is it actually legal to keep this animal?
Are you going to be able to release it? Can you mark it if you need to mark it? And we want to be thinking about all those things as part of our triage process.
When the animal comes through the door, it's not just can you treat it, but are you gonna have all those other things in place because if you want, then euthanasia might be a better thing than treatment. If the second half of this lecture, I'm gonna talk about first aid, which once you've made your initial assessment, it might not be appropriate to be anaesthetizing the animal to examine it properly. It might be that you need to do some first aid in the same way.
You would with a dog or cat that came in from RTA, you know, immediately going to do your diagnostics and really are components of first aid for wildlife casualties are exactly the same as they are for dogs and cats, but it's really important we don't miss this stage of our treatment. Our first components fluid therapy, and also all of you will know, we use fluids for two reasons. One is to correct dehydration, and the other is to deal with shocks and hyperkalemia.
And if we think about why our wildlife casualties come in, then they're either chronically ill animals and they're gonna be dehydrated and need some fluids to correct that. Or they're going to be animals that have been acutely traumatised and hit by a car or flown into a window, and then they're going to be shocked as a result of that. I appreciate there are some other reasons for shock, but in wildlife, most of those you'd probably be euthanizing the animals anyway.
So if we think about a fluid therapy in this way, really all our wildlife casualties need fluids, and it might be that those fluids can be provided just with some oral fluid that the animal could drink, but equally it might be you need to provide fluid therapy supplementary in in some other ways. So how do we assess hydration status? Well, again, it's just the same as in dogs and cats.
We can use some clinical parameters. We can look at gum clola capillary refill time or venous refill time in birds using a basilic vein. It depends how hands on, you can obviously be with your animal, but we can be using all the same things and we, we should be.
If we're able to get some blood, and certainly if we're placing an IV line for intravenous fluids, that's easy. We can do a minimum database. So thinking about things like PCB and lactate and total solids can be really useful for us to assess our hydration, status and assess just how much intravenous fluid we need to give.
We should also teach our wildlife rehabilitators to assess hydration status, because for animals that are not that dehydrated, the sort of 5% dehydrated ones, it's possible to teach them to provide that fluid therapy, either through scavenging birds or subcutaneous fluids, but also So they need to appreciate when animals are more dehydrated than that. So our animals that are 10 or 15% dehydrated, there's nothing a wildlife rehabilitator is going to be able to do to correct that dehydration. Those animals are going to need intravenous or intraosseous fluids, so they need to see, a vet.
So how do we give fluids? Well, it's just the same as our domestic animals. If the animal will drink, then make use of that good.
It provides more rehydration fluids. So that's fairly straightforward to do. We can give some an IP fluids and with some of the smaller animals, smaller mammals that might be appropriate.
But if animals are coming into us because they're really dehydrated and lay rehabilitators can't provide fluids, then we're really looking at using intravenous and intrasseous methods to do that. We probably want to be firing quite big bolus into these animals both because they're quite shocked in many instances, but also once they're awake, they're going to be very good at pulling out their IV or IO catheters. So bolus in, you know, grown up rates is, is what we want to be aiming to do and obviously we can go above 30 mL per kilogramme per hour and up to, you know, sort of 50 or 90 if animals are really shock for short term bonuses.
When it comes to giving fluids to birds, actually birds are much easier because in most instances we can crop tube them, gaage them, and we can go up to 50 mL per kilogramme with a gauging tube, and we can, sorry, you can train rehabilitators to be able to do this. Subcut and IP fluids in birds have got bigger limitations than mammals, which I'll I'll talk about in a minute. And we can do introsous fluids, so again, pneumatized bones give us problems, but probably our second best way of giving fluids to the.
Birds is to make use of that medial metatarsal vein and to give intravenous fluids and really anything from, you know, seagull or even smaller size up. If these birds are coming to you, it's really easy to place an IV catheter and use that route. A sub fluid, in mammals, you all know how to do this.
Remember your fluids need to be warm, your patient needs to be warm, your fluids need to be sterile if you're having a wildlife centres doing this, and you can use hyaluronida to try and improve the uptake of fluids. So essentially these are routes that you can teach lay rehabilitators to use. When it comes to subcultures in birds, we can use all those areas where wings or limb, legs, join the body, and probably the pre-cruural area would be my favourite one to use.
But we need to be really careful about air sacks, and particularly in birds like sea birds, which have quite extended air. Sacks, and if we're giving some fluids, there's a real risk of this injecting into our sacks. And really I'd say subcutaneous fluids in birds probably aren't really necessary in wildlife rehabis hands because largely we can gavage or we can use that medial metatarsal vein.
So intravenous fluids, so, as well as the medial mastars in birds, we can also use superficial ulnar and the right jugular, but the median mastotarsal is such a lovely accessible vein, it's really well tolerated, so that's what I would go for. In mammals, it's just the same veins as you would use, in your dogs and cats. And again, we're tending to use the cephalic vein, in, in most animals.
But the cefinas can be useful just from an access point of view, you know, if you've got a big blanket on a badger's head, it might be an easy one to get to, to a cephalic vein. We can use the marginal vein, but I find really that even in domestic rabbits, it's not always brilliantly toleration. Certainly I think in wild rabbits, it's quite stressful for them having ear vein catheters, placed.
So it's not something we would commonly use. And to be honest, wild rabbits and hares probably don't come in with that many things that are solvable that you'd be using, fluids for too much. Introsseous fluids are really useful and this is something that I will use in, in rabbits and hares.
I, I think it's quite nice to be able to do this. We can use introseous fluids in birds, but we probably tend not to for the reasons I've already described and also because we've got the issue of pneumatized bones in birds. But in mammals, particularly the small mammals.
So, hedgehogs, rabbits, hairs, squirrels, it can be really useful if we can't get IV access. So in those collapsed animals, we can put a bolus of fluids, through these sites. So, the proximal humerus, proximal tibia, and, proximal femur are all useful sites.
I tend to like the proximal, tibia, or the proximal femur. Analgesics, it's really important that we remember that wildlife feels pain, and just because wild animals don't, react to pain, largely because a lot of them are prey species as far as human beings are concerned, we still need some good analgesia on board, not least because good pain relief means animals recover quicker and therefore can go back to the wild quicker. So ideally we'd be providing some sort of multimodal analgesia, including a non-steroidal, which you will all know provide reasonably good analgesia.
We don't have safety restrictions with them, so they can be in wildlife hospitals and prescribed by SOPs. There can be those issues with gut, liver and kidneys. So we need to really be thinking about hydration, thinking about vomiting and diarrhoea in.
Make sure we're not using non-steroidals inappropriately, particularly wildlife hospitals when they may be slightly less in the control of, of vets. In terms of which one you use, well, follow the cascade, think about, the COX 2 selective non-steroidals. Think about how you're going to give it.
So it might be easy to inject on day one, but what the wildlife rehab is going to do is follow up for you. Make use of formularies and the BSABA formula, carpenter and the wildlife Manual have all got nice doses in, but meloxicam because of its flexibility in the liquid and injectable forms is probably the drug the most commonly used. Don't get to use opioids as well, ideally alongside a non-steroidal, and it's just the same as it would be in domestic animals.
So morphine, methadone and so mammals, buorphrenol and buprenorphine in birds. And these have the advantages of of producing really good analgesia without the side effects of non-steroidals. They combine well with non-steroidals.
We can again extrapolate the doses from our domestic species. They are controlled drugs though, so they shouldn't. Wildlife hospitals unless there's a vet there, they need to be locked away and I think they're a really good reason for wildlife cases to see a vet early on.
I think can stress to wildlife rehabilitators that this is a reason why those animals need to see a vet. Steroids have a real issue with wildlife centres. I don't think they should be there.
We don't use them to treat shock anymore in people and, animals, and that's because there's a strong evidence base for them not really being of much benefit in trauma cases. But I still see them being used a lot in, wildlife hospitals and I I think there's some additional reasons why they're bad in wildlife. Their immune is suppressive.
So, you've got animals that are already stressed with high steroid levels in captivity, and we're going to give them some more. A lot of them carry things like salmonella, mycobacterium that we know that those are shed when our immune competence is lowered. And of course steroids stops is using non-steroidals and it runs the risk of gut, liver, and renal compromise.
So steroids really shouldn't be in wildlife hospitals, so there's no good reasons for them being there. Fracture support is really important in birds to stop further self trauma. It's sometimes all that's needed to help fractures to heal, but you need to remember that if you don't take it off every few days and wiggle those wings, that you're going to end up with compromise of, of joints that happens really quickly.
So usually 2 or 3 days, take your band. Off, move the joints, reassess things, rebandage for 2 or 3 days if you need to. Usually in the smaller species, just two lots of bandages and it's enough.
Once you get to things like swans, you might need to do that a bit, for a little bit longer, but you still need those periods of joint movement in between. You can use wing possession position in birds and to assess where fracture site is, and this is where it's hard doing a webinar because normally I'd wave my arms around at this point in order to explain what I'm seeing. But basically by looking at the position the wings held in, you can assess whether the fractures in the lower part of the wing.
Whether it's in the middle of the wing around the elbow humerus, or it's up in the shoulder or more commonly in the petrol girdle that coracoid area. So this is a really good way and it's something I teach wildlife rehabilitators to try and work out where the fracture is without overly manipulating that fracture site. Once we've got that information, we can take it forward to think about how we need to bandage that wing.
So if you remember, I've just said we don't want to overstrup joints in birds because they fuse. What we're aiming to do is support the fracture site whilst allowing as much movement as possible in The areas that are not damaged. So if that wings dangling on the ground and the fractures right down in the manner or the lower part of the radius and ulna, then we can just take the primary feathers, which allows the wing to continue moving at at the elbow and shoulder.
If we've got fractures of just the radius and ulna, then we can do a figure of 8 to hold the radius and ulna against the humerus. And if we've got fractures higher up, then we bring that figure of 8 around the body, leaving the opposite wing free. Our aim is always to support the bits that are damaged and enable the other joints to keep moving.
We might need to keep our animals in our veterinary practises for a while, and there's a few things to think about if we do this. Put them in isolation, ideally, have them somewhere quiet where there's not a lot of traffic and noise. Make sure they're in a cage or kennel that they're not going to damage themselves on or wreck your cage or kennel.
Make sure you've got suitable bedding that they can hide in and under, but they're not going to eat and cause themselves any digestive problems. Give them some seclusion. And remember with birds that a lot of birds need to perch, and they might need to be on water if there's something like grebes or divers.
And if the big birds like swans, they need a lot of padding in order to stop them getting a damage around their keel bone. Think about your environmental conditions. I have some natural light, ideally, and if you're keeping things long term, start thinking about UVB spectrum for them.
Think about the duration of light. So some of these animals are nocturnal or crepuscular, so they're, they're gonna have a bit of night day reversal going on there. So ensure that they've got some darkness for at least some of the time.
You might of course need to change your lighting levels if you're managing animals where you need good observation, if you're not able to be hands-on, but you just need to watch them. Have appropriate ventilation and humidity, you'll do this because your practise will smell otherwise, but make sure that you, you have that. Think about temperature, as is always the case with first aid, stop heat loss first, and then slowly warm your animals within its thermo neutral range.
And remember, for some of the small birds that thermo neutral range is going to be much higher than it would be for mammals and your reptiles and amphibians. When we're thinking about temperature, provides good insulation and warmth, and we do this in the same way as we would ordinarily do in practise. But remember that these animals might damage your equipment.
They might chew cables, they might burst hot hands, they might wreck you very expensive bear hooker. Blanket. So, make sure that it's appropriate for the stage of debilitation of the animals.
So when the animals kind of, you know, if it's collapsed and not that responsive, then you can provide one type of warmth. But once it's awake moving around, you maybe need to think differently. Think about human interaction.
We're really not wanting these animals to be hearing and seeing us. Don't touch them, don't stroke them, don't have any contact with them unless it's essential. We don't want them to become habituated.
Used to human noises, and if they're neonatal and juvenile animals, we don't want them to become malprinted. So we can set the standards for our wildlife rehabilitators with this. So it's really important that we make it appropriate to our wild animals.
The amount of human interaction that you want to be having can also influence the extent to which you can carry out your monitoring and the type of monitoring. So sometimes things like remote cameras are really useful when we're monitoring our wildlife. Think about hygiene.
These infectious agents will move in all directions. They'll move to your staff, they'll move to your direct domestic animal patients, but also you're a risk to the wildlife, particularly some of your dogs and cats will be a risk to wildlife. So ideally put the wildlife in isolation and Barry and nurse it.
Remember hygiene between patients if you're dealing. With lots of wildlife, that's particularly the case with things like large numbers of hedgehogs in wildlife rehabilitation centres, clean equipment well or throw it away and think about which infections you're trying to treat with De have approved disinfectant list. So if you're dealing with badges, you need to TB approved and disinfectant safe for would be fine for that.
Think about energy, a lot of our very little species have really high metabolic rates, and once we've corrected the dehydration, we need to provide some energy in the form of glucose. So we can put glucose in drips, but it's much better and easier really just to feed them. So don't forget about feeding perhaps more quickly than you might do with domestic animals.
And we can have this set up in our practise where we've got a whole variety of feeds that are appropriate for emergency wildlife casualties. So you need to know what food to give and use as natural food as possible. And again, all that would be in something like the BSABA wildlife Manual.
You can make use of a lot of dog and cat foods, commercial diets, but you can also have little stores of things like seeds, fish in the freezer, those sorts of things. Keep really good records for just the same reasons as you would, normally for legality, to follow the trends, to know what's happening with the animal. Send, the, those records with the animals when it moves to rehab centre, but keep copies, you.
You might need to justify what you've done to VMD to the RCBS, so make sure you keep yourself really good records. Encourage your wildlife centres to keep records too, and maybe do reviews of the sorts of things they're keeping. Once you've done your first aid, you might need to make a diagnosis.
You need to do that fairly early on. And as I've said already, the best way of doing that is a complete and detailed examination, which you might need to do under sedation or anaesthesia. We can use our diagnostic aids, but we need to be thinking about the cost benefit of using them and also the disadvantages.
So is the equipment really suitable for the casualty? Are you gonna have an issue with cleaning your endoscope afterwards if you scoped badger? Do you have Reference ranges for that species if you've taken blood, can your haematology machine actually run haematology for that species and in most instances the answers will be no biochemistry is usually OK, and there are reference ranges in the textbooks.
But really is doing lots of tests just gonna spend the wildlife Centre's money or is it gonna really change your prognosis? So just stick with your examination initially and then use your diagnostic case to add detail in those animals that you're gonna take forward into a treatment phase. And at all stages, keep going back over the same things, you know, can you treat it?
Have you got somewhere for it to go? Will it be able to go back to the wild? Are you delaying its release so much that it won't be able to migrate?
Is everything you're doing legal? Remember that you're only part of the process. You're gonna need to find an appropriate centre for ongoing care.
And it's really important that that care is adequate. And I would definitely go and visit your centres. Go and make sure that they're really geared up to take this animal through to release.
And remember legally, these animals are still under your veterinary care, you know, unless you've actually handed them over to a vet, another veterinary surgeon. If it's simply that the wildlife Centre is looking after it, you do have some responsibility, to make sure you, you follow that through. Excellent.
That's the end of my presentation. I'm happy to take any questions. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Liz, that was a wonderfully er informative webinar and I'm sure for many, many people hopefully very useful for them as well. So if you have any questions, ladies and gentlemen, please do submit them into the Q&A box now. We'll try to get through, them.
We have about 10 minutes left. So we just wait for those to come in. What are the, the most common, wildlife, species that you, you'd see in practise typically, Liz?
I think probably over the UK as a whole, it's gonna be hedgehogs and small garden birds. So, black birds, starlings, pigeons, collared doves, those sorts of things. After that, it depends where you are.
If you're lucky enough to Be up in somewhere like open in Scotland, you're going to see a lot of otters and seals and some of the bigger birds of prey. If you're down in the southwest, you're gonna see a lot of badgers. So I think if you're in practise, it's worth thinking about that and being well rigged up the species you'll see, because, you know, those are the things you need to know the most about and the ones you need to have the gear in your practise to deal with.
Yeah, absolutely. And are there any good places that that vets can go for resources or a bit more information about the the most common ones? So I was slightly biassed, but I, I guess the reason I got involved doing the BSAVA wildlife Manual was I was just in practise and I was frustrated about the lack of information.
So, obviously, we've got the second edition of that, but it does really give every, every, people in practise everything they need. From that bit of ecology and biology at the Beginning that, you know, helps you with something you're really unfamiliar with. I'd say the other really good source though is you rehabilitate themselves because I'm not a great ornithologist, you know, some, juvenile birds will come into me, and I'm not really sure what it is, but my wildlife rehab friends will be really good.
And of course, you know, we can all text a photo of it. Our mates now. And that develops a nice relationship.
I think anybody who deals with exotic pets will know the same that, you know, if you can work with, say, somebody who keeps calling carp and they know better than you in some ways, how to keep them, you get a really good working relationship. So I think make use of wildlife rehab as you're part of a team with this process. Yeah, absolutely, and I think, you know, we are lucky to live in an age where information is so easily accessible and as you say, networking is, it can be done so easily.
Don't have any questions that have come in so far. What would be the most exotic wildlife you've treated? I guess it's sometimes the things that don't come in as wildlife.
We've had things like a badger on the roof of the house and it's been a raccoon or something like that. So you're, you're not expecting that. In terms of, procedures, you get into some things like, say, bats that are long term captive.
So I've done things like spade, very small bats with ovarian cysts. So that's kind of, I guess, one of the sort of weirdest sort of intervention, things. I mean, really, like any other aspect of veterinary medicine, common things are common, and, you know, that should be the things you get good at.
Or try to get good at. So dealing with territorial bite wounds and badges, getting hooks out of swans. So there are some really, you know, common things.
Often the more interesting things are interesting diseases where the animal's actually really debilitated and just needs to be put to sleep. So it, it is common traumas that I suppose most commonly, we're dealing with that can be our successful cases. Mm.
We do have a question here from Catriona. He says our local wildlife rescue organisation went and did some training, and they came back with a whole pile of SOPs and now on antibiotics, including Mrefloxacin, to be in their meds cupboard. I'm not very comfortable with this, but what are your thoughts?
I'd like to know where those SOPs come from. Yeah, so the SOPs are not or shouldn't be coming from the wildlife rescue centres. The SOPs should be coming from the vets that you all that your way of prescribing.
So if you read the BPZS guidelines on prescribing, vets can basically prescribe in three ways, in person, seeing the animal over the telephone or in a carefully worded SOP. But the SOP is your SOP, you as a vet are saying in these circumstances, this is a drug I as a vet will prescribe. So the ones we have at Secret World are are really carefully written so that the staff don't.
Diagnosed because that's the veterinary surgeon's thing. And so the written, so it's very much on these are the things you might be seeing, or you might suspect suspect a fracture, but it's never saying, here's what you do for ringworm. It's always, you know, hedgehogs are itchy and scaly or or whatever.
So the carefully worded from that point of view, they then don't have any choice of drug. It says in these circumstances, is what you'll give, and they're really down to maybe 4 or 5 drugs, meloxicam, Singulox, Bero in some really small situations. There's not very much they have.
The doses are given quite specifically and then the other thing in that is so is exactly when the animal needs to see a vet. So in some instances, it's tomorrow, in other instances it might be the next vet visit. Which will be once or twice a week, depending on time of year.
So, yeah, to go back to Catriona's, question, I, I would turn it on its head, you know, you're right in the SOPs, and, they shouldn't be dictating what drugs. And I get really frustrated when I see things like all the floxacil being routinely used in wildlife hospitals, data being used for everything. So turn it around, get your control back there.
Yeah, that's a very good point there. . And Katrions actually said she's happy for you to contact her.
Ari, the source of the SOPs. So I've just dropped you a private message there if you can. That's brilliant.
Thank you. I mean, there, there are some, I know there are some guidelines produced by some wildlife centres with their vet involved, but then they've Distributed every time I've been asked for SOPs from Secret World, I've always said, no, I've always given help building them, but, you know, they need to be from that vet, you know, those animals are under your care, so you need to be driving it. But yeah, I'll get, I'll get in touch with her.
That's fine. Absolutely, thank you. Deborah's asking, what's the most unusual operation you've done on wildlife and, and what wildlife was it done on?
I don't think it's difficult saying unusual. I, I suppose some of the biggest surgeries have been on things like badges, so I'd always be careful what you did with them. But, you know, if it's a badger cub, you can fix even some interesting fractures.
I've repaired, ruptured diaphragms, I've removed spleen and badger, which may be a little bit of an. Thing there. You also get all sorts of weird and wonderful things, you know, things that animals have eaten that they shouldn't have, but I, I don't think in a way it's any, it's necessarily that much different to dog and cat work.
I think probably our pet pets probably do weirder things than our, our wildlife in some ways. Mm. Do do you think that I mean, human activity is obviously having a massive impact on animals?
Are you seeing that quite a bit in wildlife? Yeah, I think, I don't know if anyone's been watching the BBC series recently on the wildlife in cities and I, I think, you know, a lot of our wildlife is moving and taking advantage of some of the environments we create and actually everything we see as wildlife that is about the overlap between the wildlife and people. So we aren't seen loads of diseased animals and there's, for example, loads of reasons why badgers die of diseases, but I don't really see those very often.
What I see is where badgers overlap with people, so it's road traffic accidents, snarings, those sorts of things, or even just, going into a building after a fight and hiding away so the badgers find. Somebody's Jack Russell. So it's all about overlap, and I think that's what's changing more is that, you know, those overlaps are, are greater and as I say if you look at, if anyone's watched the BBC programme, I'm watching it thinking, whoa, there's are loads of reasons why those animals might come into rehab, you know, when they're all sort of crossing roads in the middle of Singapore or something.
Yeah, yeah, it's very interesting. I believe that's all the questions we have for now. So I'd like to say thank you very much, Liz, for an excellent webinar, we really do appreciate it.