[ad_1]
Last year, a record 7,730 animals belonging to 121 different species passed through the doors of the hospital, housed in a veterinary school on the outskirts of Paris. That number has been increasing each year, as the expanding French capital has outgrown animal habitats and wildlife has sought, and sometimes struggled, to adapt to city life.
“You don’t have to go to the other end of the world to meet wild animals,” says Céline Grisot, the director, dressed in an olive green lab coat. “They are increasingly present in urban areas, because these wild animals come to seek refuge when there is no longer space for them, because their territory is being invaded. “These animals have a surprising capacity for resilience.”
Whether wild boars in Rome and Japan, otters in Singapore, leopards in mumbai or London’s ubiquitous urban foxes, wild animals have been learning to live alongside humans and often out of sight.
The Paris program is animated by the idea that the city’s inhabitants and veterinarians We must look beyond pets and also care for the wildlife among them.
Injured and sick animals. admitted to Faune Alfort They receive medical care in the hospital and then rehabilitation in an enclosure or aviary. The objective is to prepare them for release, in the place where they were found or in another suitable habitat.
For the sake of their long-term survival, they should leave with a healthy fear of people intact. That’s why the center’s staff and volunteers try to help them heal by minimizing human interaction.
Down the hall from the hedgehog, staff were feeding chirping birds, no larger than the palm of a hand, with tweezers and syringes. A recovering bird escaped from a keeper’s hands and landed on top of a shelf.
Two little ducklings were swimming in a sink full of water with a fluffy gray gosling that had been abandoned by its mother. When she was older, she would have to separate the gosling from the ducklings, so as not to confuse his natural instincts, but for the moment she had found a temporary family.
Gray herons, tawny owls, bats, seagulls, marmots, badgers, rabbits and even the occasional suburban fox or wild boar have been treated at the hospital. The swans limping through the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris and the abandoned chicks along the banks of the Seine will end up here.
The reasons for these animals’ hospitalizations vary widely: many are babies, some have been hit by cars or attacked by predators. Throughout her eight years with Faune Alfort – first as a volunteer, then as an employee and now as a director – Grisot remembers seeing animals caught in foot traps (despite being banned in France since the 1990s), falcons with multiple wing fractures and species with gunshot wounds surviving multiple surgeries before being released back into the wild.
In addition to the city moving to the habitats of these animals, there is also the effect of climate change and many of its victims end up at Grisot’s doors. He mentioned a few examples, including a Saharan sandstorm that hit Paris in 2022 and destroyed many swallow nests; elevated temperatures due to heat waves that caused baby swifts to emerge from their nests onto the sidewalk in search of relief; and hedgehogs waking up too early from hibernation due to mild temperatures and unable to find enough food.
The staff spoke quietly to keep the animals calm, so the only sounds were the squawks, chirps and chirps of the birds, and the rustling and rustling of the animals eating breakfast. Further down the small birds’ hall is the birds of prey room, which on this particular day was home to a partridge, a crow, a vulture, an owl and a greenfinch, all kept in separate bird-sized cages. a locker
Beyond the hustle and bustle of cleaning wounds and hand-feeding the animals (some of the babies need to be fed every hour or two), there is the sheer amount of household chores that come with caring for so many animals. The washing machine is always running, Grisot said, to ensure there are clean towels for everyone.
The steel shelves are lined almost to the ceiling with bowls of food of all shapes and sizes, labeled “pigeons”, “hedgehogs”, “magpies” and so on. The refrigerator is full of dead mice and worms. Sacks of pellets and other grains line another wall of a warehouse. There’s even a plastic container full of stale baguettes.
Veterinary students and volunteers support the small team that cares for thousands of animals each year.
The hospital, which occupies a narrow wing up several flights of stairs at the far end of the capital’s sprawling veterinary school campus, received only €20,000 from the municipality in 2023 and maintains a precarious existence depending on donations and sponsorships.
About 90 percent of the animals are brought here not by animal control officers, but by Parisians or suburbanites who notice an animal in distress and try to help it, wrapping a fox in towels or stuffing a bird in a shoebox and delivering it here. .
Grisot said it can sometimes be difficult to see his team’s impact. “We put little band-aids on ourselves. That’s all we can do,” he said.
Real change, he said, would require humans to conceive of themselves in a completely different way: to understand that they are one animal among many living in the city of Paris, coexisting with dozens of species on any given day.
“When you look at Paris from the sky, as soon as you get away from the center, you are surrounded by forests and green areas,” he said. “We have to be more humble and strive to have the least possible impact on the environment.”