“Nature doesn’t build machines that go 70 miles an hour. They don’t build barbed wire and electric fences. They don’t knock down trees that have nests in them. So this is man-made. So what can man do about it?” – Dr. Paula Bratich
Dr. Paula Bratich has been a veterinarian for 33 years and has dedicated much of her career to wildlife rehabilitation. Working closely with organizations like Paws Critter Crossing, she brings both medical expertise and deep compassion to caring for injured and orphaned wild animals. When she’s not treating wildlife, she can be found with her beloved German Shepherd mix, Bach, who has his own special gift for providing comfort to those who need it. Enjoy this conversation with someone who truly understands that with human impact comes human responsibility.
How long have you been a vet?
About 33 years.
And why did you end up in that profession?
I think it was greatly influenced by my grandfather, who, even though he came off the ship from Yugoslavia, he was a big animal person. So we lived in the same building as my grandpa, and he had an outside dog, an inside dog. Underneath the garage, he had animals, rabbits, birds. So I grew up with him until he died when I was about eight. And then it was just one of those things. I always wanted to become a veterinarian when I realized there was such a thing as a veterinarian. So I was one of those little kids that said, I want to grow up to be a veterinarian. And I do it now.
How did you get started with wildlife rehabilitation?
When I was in vet school, though I had dogs, I missed working with animals. Your first two years of vet school are strictly books. Strictly books, no clinicals. And there was a wildlife ward at the U of I, and you could volunteer and work there. You know, hang out, clean the cages, help out with treatments, that kind of thing. So I started hanging around there just to work with live animals. And I enjoyed it. So when I ended up working at Plum Creek, Dwight Uhter, who started Paws Critter Crossing, he used Plum Creek a lot for medical care for his wildlife. And I just enjoyed it, to be honest with you.
So you’ve known Dwight a long time – he’s passed now, right?
I’ve known Dwight since 1991. He was bringing animals to Paws when I first started in Crete, when I graduated vet school. Long, long time. He was already working with the wildlife. So I’m not sure when he started, but he’d been doing it pretty much forever. He didn’t become a non-for-profit, I think, until the 1990s sometime. But he had already been doing it for quite a few years before I came along. He was still working at the University of Chicago. He hadn’t retired yet. But he was already bringing in animals into his house. He went from in his house, and he then sort of got kicked out of his house, and he was working out of his garage. And then when I came along and started helping him on a regular basis, we started getting donations to go to the rehab. That was about 2000.
Has anything changed about wildlife treatment over the years?
I think we’ve gotten more efficient and knowledgeable about nutrition, first of all. I think back then Dwight did a lot of things like goat’s milk, if I’m not mistaken. But now we use Fox Valley, and we use specific formulations for the specific species. So we have deer formula, raccoon formula, squirrel formula, opossum formula. And the opossums, after they get a certain age, they have to have a very specific diet or they’ll get metabolic bone disease. Squirrels need calcium in their diet. What we often do is put cuttlebone in their cages. So I think nutrition is definitely a huge difference.
Even with the deer, I’m more aggressive. Because years ago, we lost quite a few of the baby fawns. I sent them for necropsy to the University of Illinois. The trouble is that deer are ruminants and when they get stressed, their gut slows down. They get an overgrowth of clostridium (bacteria), which releases toxins and they die. So when they come in, I am more aggressive. I’m proactive in preventing the diarrhea. I actually have antitoxin and I give them an injection of that as soon as they come in. We’re very super observant of what the stools look like. We’ll also do things like add activated charcoal to the milk.
When you’re treating wildlife, obviously they’re not domesticated at all. So how do you mitigate stress during treatment?
First of all, we don’t put birds in our rehab. We eventually will do birds, but we’re not licensed for birds. And birds need to be quiet, you know? And raccoons aren’t quiet. Very noisy little critters.
So I think there’s a variety of things for this. One is you don’t put two species next to each other that you know are enemies, so to speak. If you have a particular one that comes in and is super stressed, you may cover that cage more than you normally would. Because a lot of times we don’t cover cages because they’ll just pull the blankets into the cage.
We also, as soon as we can, we put two or three or four together. Because you’re more stressed when you’re alone. You have a buddy or two or three buddies, it’s easier for them to handle a lot more stress, but then you have to be careful. You want them to be approximately the same age, and you may have an aggressor, so you may be more careful who you put that one with.
The new word a few years ago is environmental enrichment. So toys, things for them to do when they’re outside. We’ll have kiddie pools, hanging things from their cages. If there are animals who like to hide, little squirrel huts. So you try to cater to what they’re comfortable with. Squirrels – put sticks in there for them to climb all over with, little huts, and the huts will vary. We have little nesting areas for the bunnies. So you try to figure out what makes them comfortable and put that in their cages.
We also have hammocks. We do a lot of hammocks with the opossums and the raccoons, and they absolutely love it. And I love it because they’re not lying on newspaper with urine and stool. So they eat, they go to the bathroom, and they climb in the hammocks, and they’re all curled up with each other inside the hammock.
That’s a change too – you never used to use hammocks?
Till probably the last few years. Because when you go to try to grab them, it’s really difficult with the hammocks. The volunteers would be like, what the heck, man? I go, love the hammocks, they’re staying. So it reduces stress and it makes for keeping things cleaner.
Do you have a particular case that brought you the most joy or was your biggest success?
Oh, it was an interesting case. A lot of our baby deer usually come in because mom died hit by cars, you know, injury, usually trauma of some sort. And we had a deer here that came in, this was years ago, Dwight was still around, and a deer came in with two broken front legs. And Dwight called me and I said, there’s no way. There are two broken legs. We already know how difficult it is when you put a splint on these guys. You have to keep that splint clean. You have to recheck it every week.
And Dwight’s standing behind me going, surely there has to be something you could do. And I’m like, just shaking my head, Dwight, it’s four legs, two front ones are broken. And I said, tell you what, I’ll take him in and x-ray him. And if it’s a clean mid-shaft breaks on both front legs, I’ll splint them both. But if it even gets that far, you have to rig something up that he can pee in a crate and not get urine soaked splints.
So I take this deer, sure enough, he has two transverse mid-shaft fractures of the two front legs. So I splint both legs. And in the meantime, Dwight being the old coot he was, he made a flooring out of wood and a screen that fit into the bottom of the big airline dog crates. And he made it so it fit in there. So the deer was, and the screen was small enough that it didn’t hurt the hooves, but the pee and stool fell through. So we kept him in that crate for six to eight weeks. And the splints stayed dry and I changed them every week.
We called the deer Two Breaks. Not supposed to name them, but it’s hard when you have to keep them inside for six to seven weeks and not name them. And we were able to rehab and release him.
That’s an incredible success story. Do you have other cases that stand out?
Actually, yes. There was another deer case that’s special to me for a different reason. A baby deer came in, and this one young girl named Chloe, who had already worked at Humane Society and now was working quite a bit at Paws Critter Crossing – a smart, sweet, young lady who loved it there – she happened to be the person on duty when this baby deer came in. So I gave her instructions over the phone. I said, you know, you’ve got to set up a dog crate, you’ve got to put a blanket in there, maybe a hot water bottle, you’ve got to give it some IV fluids, you’ve got to give it an antibiotic injection, you’ve got to give it an antitoxin injection, and I gave her a list of things to do.
Then I ended up taking that baby and taking it to Chicago with me, because I was working at another clinic at the time, for an x-ray, and it was a break that could be splinted. And so I brought it back, and that baby was another one that was rehabbed and released.
Well, that young lady, there were other volunteers there, so she was teaching the other volunteers why she was doing what she was doing, and she got to see the success. She was one of my letters of recommendation and she sent me a couple things that she wrote trying to get into vet school. She wrote about that experience in her personal statement:
“In a small, glorified shed with air conditioning that provides little to no relief, magic happens. Many of my mornings start early and lead late into the night at a wildlife center, but nothing could have prepared me for the day that was to come. My morning began as I started to prepare all the diets for the various wildlife under our care and got the new volunteers started on their duties.
As I was bottle-feeding the young raccoons, I got a call from our veterinarian and received the news that an injured fawn would be coming in… Soon enough, the knocking at the door came, with a rear leg dangling, clearly demonstrating a fracture. I guided the couple to place the injured fawn in our crate and then began filling out our paperwork.
I instructed the volunteers to start getting the warming blankets ready as I finished the necessary intake paperwork. After I began assessing the fawn, administering the penicillin injections, and explaining to the other volunteers why I was doing the injections and treatments to ensure the best outcome… Over the next few months, I saw the fawn blossom under our care from fragile and shocked to eagerly sucking her formula out of the bottle and playing in her outside enclosure.
This case, along with many others, has led to my decision in pursuing a career in veterinary medicine to educate others to strengthen the human-animal bond.”
And by the way, she’s in her second year of vet school now. So it’s not just about the animals anymore – it’s about inspiring the next generation of people who will care for them.
What is it that you love the least about doing this?
Well, I would say the trauma. There is a lot of it. You get a lot of animals you can’t do anything for. You have to put them down. Period. Or turning them away because you don’t have enough room for them. You have to say, no, we can’t take them in. And people are like, what am I going to do? Well, you have to go to the Illinois DNR list and call someone else. We’re too full. We can’t take in anymore.
I think that’s probably the worst thing for a lot of wildlife rehab places. When you’re too full, you know, even shelters are too full.
So you guys don’t take birds. You used to take birds, right?
Well, Dwight would take anything and everything. And you just can’t do that, especially nowadays. That facility isn’t set up to do birds. They get super stressed. And we’re not licensed to do birds. And the other thing is he didn’t have flight cages. And so I can’t remember exactly anymore, but I think every 72 hours, you lose a certain percentage of muscles in their wings. You have to use the wings to maintain their musculature. So once you fix them, you have to put them in cages so they could strengthen their wings before you release them. Dwight used to just fix them and release them, and they’re not strong enough.
So where do you refer birds?
There’s a place called Chicago Bird Collision Monitors. And then there’s Fletch Creek Wildlife. They’re up north, I think around Naperville, but they have a drop off in Chicago.
What’s the most difficult animal to rehabilitate?
Probably the deer. They like to imprint. You have to be very careful with, and we don’t like only having one deer. You want the deer and at least two if not more deer so the deer hang with the deer and become a herd and you don’t want to encourage people to pet them and give them names. They imprint. Raccoons are the easiest to rehab and I’d say the deer are the hardest.
If there’s anything that you would want to say to the general public about wildlife, what would it be?
Well, number one is be careful. It’s amazing what people will do to try to save the animal and put themselves in positions where they could really get hurt. I had one lady call and say that she had this baby raccoon and how sweet it was and how wonderful it was and I said, it’s either sick or it’s been hand raised because he’s not sitting in your lap like that because he’s a nice wild animal. And she didn’t believe me and she brought the baby raccoon and David happened to be there when she brought it in, it bit him. And she yelled at him and then when I showed up, the racoon was seizing. I had to euthanize him and send him for rabies testing and then she called me and was yelling at me.
So my thing is, be careful. They can spread diseases. They can bite you. If you insist on helping, try to wear gloves if possible. Always keep that in mind. You can use towels. You can throw containers over them and try to get them in a transport box and then, more importantly, call a rehabber. If you can’t do any of that, you can try to call your local animal control because most of your rehabbers don’t have the volunteers and the insurance to come and get them.
I’ve had people yell at me asking ‘what am I supposed to do?’ And I try to explain to them, we don’t have the volunteers or insurance to come and get them, so you’ll have to call your local animal control. Now, some places, some villages don’t have animal control. And I said, well, sometimes you can call the local police. You could try calling DNR and sometimes you will find an area, especially if it’s in a forest preserve or somewhere that is on their property, they may sometimes come up. And we definitely work with animal control.
To learn more about wildlife rehabilitation or to support Paws Critter Crossing, visit their website at pawscrittercrossing.org. Their work is provided entirely by volunteers and funded solely by public donations as they continue to expand their mission of helping wildlife affected by human activity.