10/16/2026
How is animal welfare included in wildlife rehabilitation?🐾
Here at Salish Wildlife, we follow the Five Freedoms. Originally established by Britain’s Farm Animal Welfare Council in 1965, these standards have been adapted and adopted into most institutions that care for any animal, domestic or wild. These are the pillars that outline the conditions required to protect an animal’s physical and mental well-being.
🥬Freedom from hunger and thirst: access to fresh clean water and a diet that maintains the animals health. Diets are specialized to species care needs, such as life stages or emaciation.
🦝Freedom to express normal behavior: Providing sufficient space, proper enrichment, and the company of other animals of their own kind. Reinforcing natural behaviors like human avoidance and foraging, tailored to species specific survival traits.
💚Freedom from fear and distress: Ensuring conditions and treatment that avoid mental suffering. Psychological stress can quickly turn into physical illness. Humans are a stressor for wildlife, by interacting with the animal only when necessary for care stress levels stay low.
🪺Freedom from discomfort: Provide the appropriate environment including shelter and comfortable resting area. Enclosures tailored to species needs; temperature(nestlings), hides, appropriate branches.
🩺Freedom from pain, injury, and disease: Prevention or rapid diagnosis and treatment. In rehabilitation, this includes humane euthanasia if the prolonged outcome would require lifetime care.
Every time we take in an animal for care these 5 freedoms are always in the back of our minds. Species needs, care requirements, diagnosis, and patient attitude are all factors considered and revisited while the animal is in care.
