A Nova Scotia wildlife rehabilitation center is reminding people to be cautious with garbage after a raccoon and a turtle, both entangled in trash, came into care of Hope for Wildlife.
The raccoon is timid, but alive and recovering from surgery to remove a thick plastic ring from around his neck.
“Right now we’re just keeping him comfortable, getting him on meds so he can stay calm,” says Melissa Mcdermid, wildlife rehabilitator.
He was brought to Hope for Wildlife at the end of March by a man who saw the raccoon near his property. The animal was around for a month before I managed to catch it in a live trap.
The more the raccoon grew, the tighter the ring became around its neck.
“It would have constricted his throat enough that he wouldn’t have been able to breathe or eat so he would have either died of starvation or suffocation,” McDermid says.
The problem isn’t just with land animals. The center is caring for a turtle that came in with something wrapped around its body.
“There’s many reasons why wildlife ends up here but one of the top four is when animals get caught up in our garbage,” says Hope Swinimer, the center’s founder.
There are ways humans can limit the affect of waste on wildlife, such as reducing garbage, avoiding littering, and cut objects that can get caught around an animal.
“We get a lot with the things wrapped around their neck. Plastic they can stick their head in and then as they grow that stays on there and it causes real problems. We get seals washed up on the beach with netting around them. We get skunks with jars on their head, we see a lot of different things, elastic bands are very common to takeoff wildlife that arrive,” Swinimer says.