Wildlife rehabilitation is the practice of saving injured, sick, or orphaned wildlife by taking them out of their habitat and nursing them back to health. Rehabilitated animals are returned to the wild whenever possible. Although precise estimates of the numbers of wild animals rehabilitated are impossible to obtain, the practice seems to be expanding in nations such as the United States and Canada. The National Wildlife Rehabilitators Association (NWRA), an international group formed in the early 1980s, estimates that its members treat about 500,000 wild animals annually, with at least twice that number of telephone inquiries.

Wildlife rehabilitation differs from wildlife management in the sense that rehabilitators focus their attention on the survival of individual animals, often without regard to whether it is a member of a rare species. Wildlife managers are principally concerned with the health and well-being of wildlife populations and rarely concentrate on individuals...