The Unintended Harm: When 'Rescuing' Wild Baby Animals Becomes Kidnapping

Connie Hall had been awake most of the night, bottle-feeding some of the hundred deer she was caring for, when a couple arrived at her driveway with a wild newborn fawn. When they’d picked up the infant the day before by a road, he seemed healthy, but now he was sick. Hall, who has run Magnolia Fawn Rescue in South Carolina for 25 years, knows that it’s normal for mother deer to leave babies on their own for hours. But instead of moving the baby to the nearby woods to wait for the mother, the well-meaning couple took him home. Hall held the bleating newborn against her chest. “It started jerking and having a seizure in my arms, which was tearing my heart out,” Hall says. After so many hours without the crucial nutrients of his mother’s milk, the fawn died in Hall’s arms. As spring awakens across North America, wildlife rescuers brace for an onslaught of young animals who are “babynapped” or “kidnapped” by people with good intentions inadvertently putting them in danger. These abductions have become a massive problem, licensed wildlife rehabilitators say—each year, thousands of baby animals who were thriving in the wild are stolen from their homes, and many lose their lives because of it. “We call it ‘kidnap with intent to rescue,’” says Raelee Barth, who runs clinic operations at the Alberta Institute for Wildlife Conservation in Alberta, Canada. “[The people] were trying to help, they were trying to rescue it, but they did kidnap it unfortunately. Any of the mammals where the mom leaves the babies alone are the ones where we see it the most often.” Baby deer, rabbits, raccoons, ducks, and songbirds are some of the most common kidnapping victims. “People see this little, tiny rabbit sitting on their front lawn all by itself, and they panic,” says Barth. “If you saw a little human baby sitting outside like that, that would be absolutely nuts.” What most people don’t realize is that a mother deer who leaves her baby for most of the day is protecting them, not abandoning them. That’s because adult deer have a scent that predators can catch, but babies do not. “[Mother deer] don't want to bring any attention to their baby,” says Jessica Chiarello, a licensed wildlife rehabilitator at Evelyn Alexander Wildlife Rescue Center in Hampton Bays, New York. “So, mom is off during the day foraging, then they mostly come back early in the morning and late at night.” Jackrabbit and cottontail moms also leave their babies so that predators can’t track a scent. Fledgling songbirds, on the other hand, are mistaken for orphans since they’re on the ground learning to fly. “They might be standing around looking bewildered, but then the parent will show up and feed them,” says Catherine Quayle, of the Wild Bird Fund in New York City. (It’s important to note that nestlings—newborn birds with few or no feathers—do need to be returned to their nest, if it’s within reach, or taken immediately to a rehabber.) There are no official numbers for how many baby animals are kidnapped each year, but experts say their own individual figures are alarming. Hall says about one-third of her fawns are kidnapped. Barth says with species like jackrabbits at her organization, it’s at least 60 percent; more than 40 percent of cottontail rabbits she saw last year were babynapped. “It’s a big problem for us,” says Quayle, whose bird rescue takes in 3,000 fledglings each year. And last year the team at Evelyln Alexander fielded hundreds of calls that stopped unnecessary kidnappings from coming in, though they still received plenty of patients who were babynapped. Last year in Alberta, Barth and her team took in 112 jackrabbits—at least 67 of them had been kidnapped. Unfortunately, the success rate for survival for rabbits tends to be only about 10 percent, she says. “It comes with such a sadness of knowing all that they’ve been robbed of,” says Chiarello. “It’s good intentions going really wrong for a lot of these cases.” Ironically, animal lovers may be most likely to commit this fauna faux pas. One review of current literature noted that anthropomorphism—giving an animal human qualities—can build empathy, but it can also be detrimental to wildlife: “This can be seen when humans project our understanding of our infants’ needs on young animals.” When a healthy animal is kidnapped, the clock starts ticking and the chance of survival or release begins to dwindle, especially if they don’t go straight to a licensed wildlife rehabber. Newborn fawns, like the one delivered to Hall in critical condition, need hydration within a few hours, but it can’t be cow’s milk because it causes bloat, a life-threatening condition. They also need their mother’s colostrum, a key ingredient in breastmilk, within about seven hours after birth, Hall says. Bunnies also need their mom’s milk and are susceptible to bloat. Birds, if taken home and fed the wrong nutrients over time, can develop metabolic bone disease, which can lead to brittle bones and make recovery difficult. Many well-meaning people offer a wild bird food or water—which can get into the healthy bird’s lungs, leading to pneumonia and likely death. Many kidnapped animals, particularly prey species and ungulates, experience extreme stress and are susceptible to capture myopathy, a metabolic disease that exhausts the muscles, causes organ damage, and is almost always is fatal, sometimes within minutes. “It's basically like they get so stressed…it can lead them into kidney failure, heart issues, and they often die from it,” Barth says. And high enough cortisol levels—also driven by stress—can trigger a heart response, especially when paired with dehydration, says Erica Miller, an expert in wildlife medicine and veterinarian with the Wildlife Futures Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Stress and a poor diet can also cause an imbalance of bacteria in a rabbit or deer’s GI tract, leading to a deadly infection. As if all of this weren’t bad enough, in some states, the mere act of taking an animal is legally a death sentence. Miller says that rehabbers in Pennsylvania counties with chronic wasting disease—a contagious and fatal neurological condition—are not allowed rehabilitate deer to avoid the spread. This can lead to euthanasia once the deer is brought to a rescue. In Arkansas and Nebraska, it’s illegal to rehab deer statewide, so a kidnapping is a death sentence if the deer isn’t immediately returned to the exact spot. It’s also illegal to rehab some rabies-vector species in some states, so a baby raccoon, for example, would likely be euthanized in Idaho, regardless of their health status. There’s also the chance that a kidnapped animal will imprint on a human. This is especially common with ducks and deer. Imprinting is a way that newborn animals learn who they are, including species-specific behavior. For example, a duck raised by a human might not realize they’re a duck. Imprinting is often an irreversible process. And when there’s nowhere else for an imprinted animal to go, such as a local sanctuary that houses permanent residents, many imprinted animals are euthanized if they don’t lose their fear of humans. Barth remembers one kidnapped fawn in pain from bloat who had already imprinted on humans by the time she arrived at the Alberta clinic. “In the beginning it was just absolutely heartbreaking to see how really confused she was,” Barth says. “She would just be crying out and trying to follow us around, and we had to do everything we could not to let her.” After a week, she was placed with other fawns in the hopes that she would develop a healthy fear of people. Every fawn must pass a test for a “proper fear of humans” to be released. To Barth’s great relief, the fawn passed the test and returned to the wild. But not every animal may be so lucky. “Today I got a call about a lady [who] has a fawn that’s six to seven months old,” Hall says. “She's already imprinted it. It thinks it's a dog. That's very frustrating.” If you find a wild baby animal on their own, it’s almost always best to leave them alone, unless they’re clearly injured—for example, hit by a car or bleeding. If you’re still unsure, rehabbers ask that you take a photo or video so that an expert can assess whether they need to intervene. If an animal is healthy and a non-rabies-vector species in a dangerous spot, like the middle of the road, you can move them about 20 feet off the road where their mother should return. “Rarely are they truly abandoned,” Miller says. If you must bring an animal inside for some reason, such as an injury, keep them away from other animals, don’t give them food or drink, and place them somewhere quiet, dark, and warm. Then call a licensed wildlife rehabilitator or facility—you cannot bring a wild animal to a local humane society. Most wildlife centers have a hotline where you can leave a message. If there’s no center near you, there’s likely individual licensed wildlife rehabilitators. Humane World keeps a list by state, and you can also download an app like Animal Help Now to have easy access to wildlife rescuers in the U.S. “Unless [baby animals] absolutely have a reason they have to come into care, it is almost always worse for them to be getting cared for by humans,” Barth says, “because we can do everything we can to mimic their mom, but it's never going to be the same.”