Plan A: Leave Wildlife B

In this episode of the Wildtalk Podcast, we replay one of our most popular interviews on the importance of leaving wildlife in the wild. 

Episode Hosts: Rachel Leightner
Producer/editor: Eric Hilliard

Questions or comments about the show? Contact the DNR Wildlife Division at 517-284-9453 (WILD) or email dnr-wildlife@michigan.gov.

Transcript

Announcer:

The Michigan DNR Hunt Fish app is your digital connection to all things hunting and fishing in Michigan. Buy store and display your hunting and fishing licenses. Check your points and chances for elk and bear. Apply for the draw and view drawing results. Access all the hunting and fishing regulations. View your Hunter safety certificate and report your harvest all from within the Michigan DNR Hunt Fish app. Just click the app banner at the top of the page for download instructions at michigan.gov slash hunting.

You know what that sound means. It's time for the Michigan DNR'S Wild Talk Podcast. Welcome to the Wild Talk podcast, where representatives from the DNR'S Wildlife Division chew the fat and shoot the scat about all things habitat, feathers and fur. Everybody with insights interviews and your questions answered on the air, you'll get a better picture of what's happening in the world of wildlife here in the great state of Michigan.

Rachel:

Hey everyone. Welcome to the Wild Talk Podcast. This is Rachel checking in. To let you know this month's podcast episode will be a replay of one of our most popular interviews on why you should leave wildlife in the wild. Spoiler alert, we're going to be talking about diseases that can be passed from animals to humans and vice versa. You'll want to stick around after the interview for your chance to win a Wild Talk podcast camp mug. But first, a word from our forest.

Speaker 3:

Trees provide for the wellbeing of our state. That's why we work so hard to keep our forest healthy and abundant so wildlife has a home and so do people so that there's clean air and water for everyone. And so Michigan's economy can be as strong as the trees that support it because every branch of forestry ensures that future generations will always have a tree for life and forests for a lifetime. To learn how sustainable forestry benefits your life, visit michigan.gov/forestsforalifetime.

Hannah:

Welcome back to Wild Talk. Today we are going to dive into some of the reasons why natural resource agencies remove captive wildlife from the homes of people holding them as pets or rehab animals without proper licenses and training. We are excited to have some great folks here to lend their perspectives on this important and sometimes controversial topic. Joining us today are Dr. Dan O'Brien, wildlife veterinarian with the DNR, Dr. Kimberly Signs epidemiologist and veterinarian for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, and Dr. Jim Sikarskie, retired zoo and wildlife veterinary professor with MSU College of Veterinary Medicine. We appreciate you all taking the time to discuss this topic with our listeners today. So thanks for being here.

Rachel:

Yeah, thanks for joining us. We're really looking forward to this discussion today. Now, occasionally it's brought to our attention that unfortunately wildlife have been held in captivity by someone who is not licensed to do so, and we then have to go in and remove the animal or animals from the unlicensed person's custody. Now, many times people when they know this kind of encounter is happening, they'll take to social media or they'll send us their opinions on the matter and just to give our listeners a sample of the types of comments we receive, I'll read what a typical message is, "You claim to care about animals, yet you punish people for helping them. How about offering to help?" Another typical comment we can receive is, "I'm writing to you with the utmost disbelief and discussed at the actions you took. These animals were loved and were lovingly taken care of, and your actions were just soulless."

So as you can hear, these comments we receive are often not supportive of our actions and people often are saying that there's no good reasons for us to remove wildlife from a person's possessions and that there has to be some other action that we could take or should have taken. So my question to the panel is this sort of situation can obviously evoke a lot of emotion, a lot of strong emotion, especially in people. And is it true that there are no good reasons for the DNR to remove wild animals from an unlicensed person?

Jim:

There are lots of good reasons for it. So no, it is not true that there's no good reason. I think one of the main reasons is the humane welfare of that animal. People can lovingly take care of them, but they don't know how to train them to be a deer or to be a raccoon. To mention a couple of the common ones that end up in captivity because they're so darn cute as babies and raising them without a mother and especially one animal alone imprints them that that's an important term. That means that they grow up thinking they're people and then they don't fit into the wild population when they're let go if they make it that far. That's one of the most important reasons I think, is the welfare. Feeding them the right things and training them how to find their own food and what things that they need to eat in the wild are really crucially important.

And the DNR isn't regulating this just because they feel like they want to be mean and take these cute little animals away from these well-intentioned people. It's their responsibility. There are diseases and parasites that people can get from those animals that can seriously compromise their health or kill them, and certainly the animals themselves often suffer by these well-intentioned people.

Dan:

Yeah, I agree, Jim. I mean, I think sometimes people who don't work with wildlife all the time lose sight of the fact that what makes wildlife so cool is that they're wild. They're not domestic animals, they're not pets. What we value about them is their wildness, and when people take wild animals into captivity and domesticate them, they're depriving those animals of the most valuable thing that they have, which is their wildness.

Jim:

That's their essence. I totally agree. That's so important. The way to really appreciate nature and the essence of those animals is to watch them in the wild to study and learn about them. And certainly there's ways to do rehabilitation right, but that's getting licensed and doing the required training. And then many times if the animal is compromised and ends up in human hands, there's quite often something wrong with it. And it might be that it's a disease that the population is going to be threatened by or Kim Dr. Signs is going to talk to us about some of the diseases that wildlife harbor as a reservoir that can spill over into human populations. And when you take that animal into your home, boy, you're inviting big problems. And the one scary one is rabies.

I mean, there's only been a couple of people survived that disease and it's still a tremendously important nationally and internationally. And the reason the DNR says you cannot, even the licensed rehabilitators care for skunks and bats is those two species can actually be rabid and shown no clinical signs of illness. So if the animal is sick and somebody rescues it and keeps it alive and he eventually returns it to the wild, maybe they returned a carrier that put the rest of the population at risk if it was a disease that the wild population is susceptible to.

Kim:

I think Jim has really provided a really, really nice overview of all the many reasons that there are for removing wildlife from someone who may be possessing them. And from the public health side of things, as he's already mentioned, anytime a person seeks to have contact with wildlife, there's the chance that they could be injured or exposed to a disease that could, worst case scenario kill them or other people that they allow to have contact with this animal while they have it in their possession. So these are activities that certainly concern us from a standpoint of the health of people.

Dan:

And then one other thing just to mention briefly is that something I don't think people think about is that what we're here to do as an agency, the DNR, is to manage natural resources that belong to everybody, that belong to all the people. That's our mission. And no one person has the right to take a public resource, a publicly owned wild animal and make it their own possession. It's just fundamentally goes against the way we manage natural resources in North America.

Jim:

Hunting is a good example. You just can't go out and hunt and shoot anything. You got to follow the rules. The seasons, the bag limits, the quotas. You got to buy a license, you got to play by the rules. And wildlife rehabilitation is regulated in a similar fashion by agencies in charge. There's so many things that we could spend hours talking about diseases and parasites and the welfare of the animals, whether it's behavioral or physical, the risk to the people and the animals and the population. Boy, it is important that somebody that knows what they're doing as far as the diseases and the parasites and the risks and the benefits helps regulate these activities.

Hannah:

People are usually well-meaning and just trying to help. But what are some of the downsides of it from the animal's animal welfare perspective? Why isn't taking an animal and trying to take care of it always a good thing for that animal?

Jim:

Well, I can think of a really good example of many years ago, and it was a licensed rehabilitator even that brought in a juvenile red-tailed hawk that had fallen out of the nest and there was no way to put it back because of the nest and all so that licensed well-intentioned person took it home and they're mediators and a cheap ready supply of meat is liver. She fed that baby hawk liver for four days and his bones turned to rubber because there's no calcium in liver and it's very high in phosphorous. And that animal couldn't stand up, couldn't move its wings. Eventually its ribs collapsed. I tried taking care of it and treated it with calcium gluconate IV and trying to pull it back, but it was too late and it only took four days on that inappropriate diet.

And it was almost intuitive that this is meat that they liver in the wild, but they eat the bones and they eat the muscle and they eat the stomach contents to get all those things. So it's challenging. I used to get 700 rats a week. That's how many birds of prey we were taken care of. And you feed the whole animal to the patients. And it's really not just important to know, but sometimes it's very hard to get what you need.

Hannah:

So it's much different than say, taking care of a dog or a cat or a domestic animal. It sounds like it's a lot more complex.

Jim:

Sure. Well, you could feed a baby raccoon just like you could a puppy, but then when you go to let it go in the wild, where's it going to find puppy chow? So nutritionally you might meet its needs with a commercially available diet. And certainly when the baby, if we're talking mammals milk, the different formulas for milk for all the different animals, whether it's a rodent or a carnivore or a herbivore that like a hoofed animal, like a deer, that they're all completely different. You just can't take a bottle of milk out of the refrigerator and feed it to them without causing diarrhea and other issues. And then certainly you might be able to get the right formula, but then when it comes time to wean them onto what they need to find in the wild, if you don't know what the mother's going to feed the baby or what the baby's going to find in the wild, it's really hard to do it correctly.

Dan:

And there are behavioral issues too. Wild animals are not used to being around people. There is a natural tendency to avoid people. And that's an adaptation that is to the advantage of that population of wild animals. They're not used to being treated as pets. Any animal can adapt to anything to some extent, but wild animals are never going to behave normally. They're never going to manifest their normal behavior in a situation where they're always around people and they're being treated like domestic animals. And Jim has had these sorts of calls, and I've had calls while I've worked for the DNR where there are what we call habituated animals where there were animals that were either raised in the wild because they lost their mothers, they were raised by people or they were taken by an individual and kept in captivity, and they become habituated to humans and they behave in a way that-

Jim:

It's abnormal. Yeah.

Dan:

It's abnormal. Exactly. And it's all to use the deer example, which Jim has seen a bunch of these. It's all people love little fawns and they love having them around and they love to feed them out of their hand. But then when those fawns grow up and they start to manifest their normal reproductive behavior.

Jim:

Especially if it's a buck.

Dan:

They become aggressive.

Jim:

There are people or they think you're a deer during the rut that's dangerous either way.

Dan:

Right. And they've got antlers and then all of a sudden the people are like, you've got to get rid of this animal. Well, there's no saving that animal at that point, that animal can never go back into the wild and people don't want to deal with it. People, even if they were well-intentioned, have destroyed the normal life of that animal. It's never going to be able to survive in the way it was intended.

Jim:

But those bucks kill people because they are not afraid of people. And another dimension is they think that people are an adversary during the breeding season. They're territorial and aggressive. You don't dare turn your back on them and you don't dare look at them to challenge them. I mean, you just don't do it because they're going to kill you. And that happens every year. Somebody gets killed by a "tame deer"

Kim:

I'll just jump in on this issue of well-intentioned people having these outcomes that are not at all what they had in mind. And when we're talking about species like bats or skunks or raccoons, either bats or carnivore species in particular, one of the things that we have to be concerned about is rabies because it is the most fatal virus that we know of and people can survive being exposed to rabies, we have treatments, but people have to recognize that they've been exposed. And so one of the situations that is so difficult for all of us to deal with, and nobody in public health likes these types of situations when they come up, but people who, well-intentioned, take in a baby raccoon or a couple of orphan baby raccoons and decide they're going to raise them, they may have the neighbors come over and help take care of these babies.

They may unfortunately get bit by the animal trying to take care of it one way or the other. It comes to a doctor's attention or to folks in public health attention that a person has been bitten, for example, by one of these baby raccoons or has handled it. And so then we're put in this position of trying to decide could this animal have rabies? Could this animal be exposing people who've had contact with it to a disease like rabies? And so what ends up happening is that unfortunately we don't have an easy way to test an animal for rabies other than euthanizing it humanely and testing its brain. So we have to kill it. And so we have to take that baby animal and have it euthanized and test it and determine whether or not it was rabid and whether people might need to receive treatment to prevent rabies.

So that's just another example of something that's very well-intentioned. You're going to help this animal, actually ends up causing its death. And maybe if you'd left it in the wild, it would've survived.

Jim:

And I'd have people say, well, why can't you just vaccinate it like a vaccinated dog or a cat? Well, the vaccines that are developed for dogs and cats are not proven to be effective if it's not an animal that the vaccine was specifically made for.

Kim:

The other point with this, because these animals often appear fine and healthy. So we can't because species like a bad or a skunk or a raccoon, they are the natural reservoir for rabies virus. So that's the species in which this virus naturally circulates in the wild amongst other bats or other skunks, et cetera. And we do know a lot about how rabies behaves in mammals, and it is fatal to most mammals. But when you're talking about a reservoir species, the species that harbors the virus in nature, we don't know how long that animal might seem normal and healthy, but still be able to spread the virus to another raccoon or to a person.

So just observing the animal and their health, whether they're acting fine eating, et cetera, may not be sufficient to tell us that this is animal does or doesn't have rabies. The only way to know is to look for the virus in their brain. In nature, viruses have to propagate themselves. And so they don't want to be so deadly that they kill everything immediately. The strains of virus evolve to get themselves passed from one animal to the next. And so that's our concern with rabies, is that the animal could look perfectly healthy and be acting normal and eating, but still be shedding the virus. And so we can't tell by looking at the animal. We have to test it.

Rachel:

Thank you. Thanks everybody for addressing the treatment that wild animals have to go through. I feel like there's this huge misconception that all animals can receive the same type of treatment, and that's just not the case. If you take in a skunk, it's not going to receive the same treatment that your cat is going to receive if it appears ill. And it's great that you address that. So we've been talking a lot about animal welfare. We've talked a bit about the individual welfare of a person and potentially their families when they take in these captive animals. What about the bigger picture, taking all the animal into your possession without a license? Does it pose risks to a greater human population? And I think we were heading this way before this question. So tell us, is there bigger problems at hand?

Jim:

Well, I think that COVID is a real good example of that. They think it might have originated from bats. Bats are a common species that carry viruses that are dangerous to a lot of other species. And certainly the responsibility of the health departments and the agencies and that to regulate and try to prevent that is obvious. And the people that don't want to listen, they oftentimes are so secure in that they think they're doing the right thing, or even though they know they're doing the wrong thing, they're not going to tell anybody. And so if they get bitten, they're not going to report themselves. But technically, when one of those animals bite somebody, you're supposed to report it to your community health department. And then like Kim said, they're going to have to test it, but if you don't tell anybody, you might just get sick and put your family at risk and put people at risk in your church or your school if your kids take that bat to school.

I mean, Kim could tell us horror stories about what people have done and how they have to do a trace back and find out that that cute little animal potentially exposed 50 people to a lethal, fatal disease. And there's parasites that you can't tell or see printer. Every raccoon in the wild carries a roundworm parasite that is very serious, and the eggs in the feces will last for a year. And if they're accidentally ingested in humans, they can cause blindness or death because they migrate through the brain. That's really scary stuff. And that's the cutest little raccoon that is shedding thousands of those larvae in its feces every day.

Dan:

And that's-

Kim:

Go ahead, Dan.

Dan:

No, I was just going to say, and that's, I mean, rabies and raccoon round worm, I mean, those are just a couple of examples, but I mean the public should understand, I mean, there are literally thousands of these diseases that can be transmitted between humans and animals. And there are surely a lot of diseases that we don't even know about yet. To get to your original question, Rachel, I mean if you're looking at the big picture, if you're looking at the population level, one of the reasons that the majority of the new infections in humans are coming from wildlife populations is because the circumstances of human society have changed to the point where we're making incursions onto areas that formally used to belong to wildlife. We're building into their areas or we're exploiting them for food or medicine or the pet trade, or there's any number of environmental or we're destroying their habitat, so they're going to come into more contact with humans than they would have in the past.

All of those things increase the interaction between wild populations and humans. And when you do that, you are just providing a perfect opportunity for diseases that used to just circulate in wildlife populations to spill over into humans and into our domestic animals. There are reasons that have evolved for wildlife to be separate from humans, and this is just another one of them.

Kim:

And for those of us that work in this realm of human health and wildlife health and production animal health, there's this concept that we use. It's called One Health. And Dan has described what One Health is perfectly. It's considering all of the factors that are involved in a disease system based on the animals, the people, and the environment. And so all of these things have a role to play in how diseases are spread through any population, whether it's animals or people. And I think for a lot of the listeners before COVID-19, most people really did not have a good understanding of these concepts. And we all know about influenza because we think of influenza as a human disease, but this is another very disease, very similar to COVID in that there's reservoirs in animals, there's strains of the virus that circulated animals.

And this is a virus that can mix and match different pieces of the virus from the different animals and humans and come up with a brand new virus that nobody has immunity to. And so every year we have to change the influenza vaccine because of these input from these different species into the virus that circulates in people. So that's a virus with pandemic potential that we deal with all the time and everyone's very familiar with. But I think before COVID, nobody really understood very well just this whole interface between people and animals, not in a real way. And this has really gotten everyone's attention as to why those of us who work in this area are very concerned about these situations where we've got people or domestic animals in contact with wildlife when that is not naturally and normally something that should be happening. And we have to think about where we put our pig farms, for example, or where we decide to build our houses.

And I guess that's one thing that has come out of this. I think it does, the general public does have a better understanding of these concerns that we have as agencies, whether it's the DNR and protecting the wildlife population in Michigan or protecting the human population from the standpoint of public health. Those are the sort of very big picture that we're trying to help people understand. And the other thing I think that I want to bring up is that I think people do hear these conservation messages. They're very concerned about wildlife health and the wildlife population. And so that's where some of this comes from. They hear that bats are threatened or that a certain species is losing its habitat, and so they want to do something to help as an individual. And so that's sometimes what drives people to try to help an individual animal.

And so it's very hard to understand or maybe accept that helping that individual is not helping the population as a whole, that this little effort that you're making is not helping. Just as an example on the public health side, we will not infrequently learn about people who find a bat on the ground outside of their home. And they've heard these messages that bats are threatened, they've lost their habitat, maybe white nose syndrome. They just have this general message that this is an endangered or threatened species. And so they take this bat in. In Michigan, most of the bats that have contact with people are pets are big brown bats. And then little brown bats would be the second most common. These are the bats that live around us in our homes, in our addicts, in the barns, around our homes. And they are not threatened or endangered yet, but they're not.

So they're not a population that's being impacted by something like white nose syndrome. And when you take that bat into your house and you try to feed it, or you have your kids try to feed it, you are potentially exposing your family to rabies. Bats are the most common species to test positive for rabies in Michigan. And so these are situations where we're going to end up testing that bat. And not infrequently these bats will test positive because they've on the ground, they can't fly, they're sick, and a sick bat could be a rabid bat. And so then we end up having to have multiple people receive rabies post-exposure treatment, which is a treatment that is, it's not simple. It's not one shot. You have to return to the doctor several times to finish the treatment. It takes two to four weeks to finish the treatment, and it is also expensive and can be painful.

So these are the consequences of people wanting to do something to help wildlife populations, and they may not understand the disease risk. And so I think that's probably one of the things that those of us on this discussion today are trying to get across, is that there's a risk to the animal and there's also a risk to the person and the people involved.

Dan:

And another aspect to that that I think the public often doesn't think about too is that these diseases don't just move one way. I mean, we tend to think about the ones that move from wild animals to humans, but it's entirely possible for humans to infect wild animals with diseases. This happens with tuberculosis. Human tuberculosis has become common in wild elephants in some places in Africa. And so if we really care about the welfare of these wildlife populations, part of that responsibility is also shielding them from our diseases too.

Jim:

I think one of the things that our listeners might be trying to decide then is, well, if we do find an animal, then what should we do? And I think many times, if it's looks reasonably normal, if it's a fawn hiding under some ferns, mom hid it there and you should just leave it there and not mess with it. But if there's some animal hit by a car or something and it needs help, there are licensed rehabilitators that are all over the state that have training. Many of them have themselves been vaccinated for rabies because you can't work with wild animals without getting bit or scratched or whatever and put at risk. So the licensed rehabilitators that I think you can just go online, Dan and find out who the rehabilitators are in your county, in your area. And every county has a conservation officer who inspects these licensed rehabilitators to make sure that they have the proper facilities and the training to do it safely and humanely for the people and the animals.

So there is a whole system out there and the agencies that are invested with the responsibility for the safety of those animals, and those people are the ones who are regulating. The way to help, is to do the right thing. Baby cottontail rabbits, people don't realize that they can't even poop for themselves. Their mom has to stimulate them to do that. And if you take over that responsibility, that animal dies a horrible death by these well-intentioned people that were putting food in one end and it wasn't coming out the other. I think the way people can help is to understand that the reason that these regulations are in place is to protect them, the people and the animals, and to follow the law.

Dan:

And very broadly speaking too, Jim, I mean, I think to just pull it back to a population level, wild populations have survived for millennia without being saved by humans. I mean, it's a uniquely human characteristic for us to want to help to do something to help these populations. But sometimes the best thing that we can do to help is to just leave them alone. We have, in some respects, our intervention as humans. The things that we do to the environment has been much more of a detriment to these wild populations than anything that we're ever going to do by just wanting to help. So sometimes the best thing to do is to just leave them alone.

Rachel:

You took my question out of my mouth and answered it before I could ask the question. I was I going to ask, what can people do if they find a hurt animal, if they find a bat in their house, if they come into contact and they want to care for it, what are the things that they can actually do for the animal? And it sounds like they should just stick to finding a licensed wildlife rehabilitator or leaving it be because if they found a wild animal, it's probably got something wrong with it and it's best to let nature take its course.

Kim:

And I'll add a little special caveat on bats. So yeah, if you find a bat, for example, in your home, which happens all the time, a lot of people's first thought is, well, I'm just going to open the door and let it go. I would ask, I guess as long as you are confident that nobody has had any contact with the bat, usually that's going to mean bites or scratches you or flies into other situations where we're concerned, where contact could occur and someone might not be aware of it, would be waking up to find in the bat in the room where you've been asleep or finding a bat in a room with a person, an adult or a child who can't account for their time in the room with that bat. They may be impaired or they're just too young to tell you whether they had any contact with the bat.

Those are situations where we would want that bat collected. And you should call your local health department and discuss the situation with them before you release the bat, because once it's gone we can't test it and we can't know if it had rabies. And if we don't have the animal to test, then we have to recommend that the people who may have been exposed to the bat go through the rabies post exposure treatment. So that's sort of the special situation with bass. And that's true too. If they've had any direct contact with say, a raccoon or a skunk or some of these other wild carnivores, we would want you to try to collect the animal if it's gone, to contact your local health department and your healthcare provider about, particularly with the bite, getting care for that bite. So that's just a little caveat.

Hannah:

That's great. Dan, you had brought this up earlier with tuberculosis as one of those diseases that not only can pass from animals to people, but from people to animals. Here in Michigan, we deal a lot with bovine tuberculosis in deer and it impacts our cattle industry, so potentially a food source for people as well as sometimes I think we've had cases where hunters have been infected after handling a sick deer that they harvested. Could you talk a little bit more about bovine TB and how that kind of interacts with humans, our food source, the cattle industry as well as the wild population?

Dan:

So bovine tuberculosis is a disease that the US Department of Agriculture has been trying to eradicate for over a century. And one of the reasons for that is that there was a time before pasteurization was common for milk from cows that TB was quite common, especially in children because there were cases of dairy cattle that had TB and they would shed the bacteria that causes bovine tuberculosis in their milk and then infect children. And so there's a long history from a public health perspective that Kim could elaborate on. But at this point, it is a disease that is very important to the cattle industry. It has a huge economic implications for the cattle industry and for global trade. And as you mentioned, we still have now that we can do what's called whole genome sequencing of the bacteria that causes tuberculosis, it makes it possible for us to make inferences about who infected whom, for example, and we have at least six cases now of TB in humans in Michigan that we know came from deer sources.

So a couple of those were people that were infected from cuts in the skin when they were gutting or working with infected deer. There were some respiratory infections in older people who had hunted deer in the past. But most recently we have a situation of a patient who was actually sick with bovine tuberculosis. They went into an emergency room with a respiratory infection, and the staff at the hospital thought it was COVID, they presented with a collapsed lung. But actually when they worked up the case, they found out it was bovine tuberculosis. And now that Kim's group and others in the Department of Health and Human Services have done their epidemiology, the evidence suggests along with the whole genome sequences that we've got, that person was infected in their youth when they were exposed to a deer in the TB area that was being rehabilitated illegally.

So we don't have these regulations that restrict what animals people can own or rehabilitate for no reason. We're not just trying to be kill joys or to constrain people who want to help. There are real reasons and real diseases that spread between animals and humans. And TB is just one of them. It's here.

Jim:

And it's a good example when you say where'd the deer get it. They got it from the cattle. So it's the livestock and the wildlife and the human populations that tuberculosis is a prime example of a zoonotic disease. That's a disease that goes from people to animals and animals to people. And that's why the DNR regulates, you can't put out big bait piles for deer hunting because you congregate the deer and potentially spread tuberculosis or chronic wasting disease is another one of the big concerns that has a devastating impact at the population level and can certainly impact then a very important resource for Michigan hunting.

Dan:

Yeah, absolutely. And it isn't just baiting either, Jim, like you say, I mean feeding, this is one of the things people get mad because they say, well, why can't we feed the deer? Or why can't we feed these animals and because we just want to see them. Well, the reality is when you feed wildlife like that, you're creating the conditions that make it way easier for these infectious diseases to be transmitted from animal to animal, both directly and indirectly when uninfected animals eat contaminated feed. So again, feeding is another one of these situations where it's not that we're trying to just be killjoys, but there are reasons. There are good scientific and public health and animal health reasons that we implement these regulations and it's not just done to be killjoys.

Hannah:

Wow. We've heard so many great insights and had some great discussion on why keeping wildlife and captivity or even trying to help an injured wild animal without proper permits and facilities is not beneficial for people or the animals. We really appreciate all the insights that our panelists have brought to us today. And just a final recap for folks listening. If you do find a wild animal that looks injured, please, please contact a licensed wildlife rehabilitator for assistance. Or better yet, just leave it be. A big thank you to our panelists today, Dr. Dan O'Brien, Dr. Kimberly Signs, and Dr. Jim Sikarskie.

Rachel:

Thanks so much for being with us today.

Announcer:

Michigan.gov/DNR trails is your destination for trail maps, trail etiquette, and trail closure information, trail information for biking, cross-country skiing, horseback riding, hiking, off-road vehicle riding, snowmobiling, snowshoeing, and even water trails for kayaking and canoeing are available. While you're there, remember to check out information about pet friendly recreation track chairs and the Iron Bell Trail, all available at michigan.gov/DNRtrails.

Rachel:

And now is your opportunity to win a Wild Talk podcast camp mug. As the thank you to our listeners, we'll be giving away a mug or two every episode. Our April mug winners are Kristen Perkins and Seth McCall. You'll want to check your emails, we'll be getting in touch with you soon. They answered the quiz question, how many teeth does a possum have? The answer to this question is 50. Possums have 50 teeth. That is many teeth. To be answered into the drawing this month. Test your wildlife knowledge and answer our wildlife quiz question. What is a group of turkeys called? Email your name and answer to us at DNR-wildlife@michigan.gov to be entered for a chance to win a mug, be sure to include the subject line as Mug Me and submit your answers by May 15th, we'll announce the winners and the answers on next month's podcast, so be sure to listen in to see if you want and for the next quiz question. Good luck everyone.

Announcer:

Michigan Conservation Officers are working hard to protect and keep the outdoors safe for current and future generations. If you witness a natural resources violation, you can call or text the report, all poaching hotline, 24 hours a day at 1 800-292-7800, or fill out the complaint form available@michigan.gov/rap. If you would like more information on becoming a conservation officer, click on Become a CO at michigan.gov/conservation officers.

Rachel:

Well, thanks for joining us on this May edition of the Wild Talk Podcast. Remember, if you have any questions about wildlife or hunting, you can call 517-284-WILD or email DNR-wildlife@Michigan.gov. We'll see you back here in June.

Announcer:

This has been the Wild Talk Podcast, your monthly podcast airing the first of each month in offering insights into the world of wildlife across the state of Michigan. You can reach the Wildlife Division at 517-284-9453 or DNR-wildlife@michigan.gov.