Animals like foxes are suffering from the impact of pesticides used to kill rats prompting the Toronto Wildlife Centre (TWC) to raise awareness about the toxic chemical.
When a concerned local stumbled upon a dying fox, she called the TWC) with the assumption that the animal had been hit by a car.
Shortly after arriving on scene, the TWC rescue team were able to capture the fox, but they noticed its behaviour was strange, and not consistent with an animal who had been hit by a vehicle.
“He appeared to faint briefly after being captured,” the TWC rescue team manager said in a press release, something they had only seen happen once before in 11 years of service.
The fox was transferred to the wildlife centre where he was carefully monitored and examined by staff who were cautious not to alarm the fox.
“The fear that wild animals feel from being close to people can sometimes be the final stressor that kills them,” the press release said.
A brief exam eliminated the possibility of the fox being hit by a car, though it was bleeding and suffering from minor wounds, which prompted Dr. Cameron Berg to start emergency treatment which included IV fluids and housing the fox in oxygen caging.
Despite ultrasounds and X-rays showing no signs of injury, the fox did not improve overnight and its symptoms became consistent with rodenticide poisoning.
Rodenticide is composed of highly toxic chemicals and is used for the purpose of killing rodents.
Anticoagulant rodenticides (ARs) can cause terrible, inhumane deaths in their target species.
The poison essentially causes the blood to stop clotting and the animal to bleed to death, according to the TWC.
But Berg had recently read a paper about a gray fox who underwent a successful blood transfusion using dog blood, so he decided to take a chance and attempt the procedure with the red fox. There are emergency blood banks that carry dog and cat blood, but not fox blood.
“By the end of the procedure, the fox already seemed a bit brighter, and by the next day he was
more aware and responsive,[and] the bleeding had stopped,” according to the TWC.
The patient is now stable, eating well and behaving normally, but because of the rodenticide poisoning it will need a 30-day treatment plan to recover before it can be released back into the wild.
This fox was poisoned by eating a rodent that had ingested rodenticide, which is also a common cause of death among bald eagles, turkey vultures, fishers and other species who eat rodents, the TWC said.
One study in California, from 1996 to 2004, concluded that 83 per cent of 24 dead coyotes tested positive for presence of ARs in the liver, with 12 deaths confirmed to have been caused by poisoning. And from 1997 to 2004, 93 per cent of 89 dead bobcats tested positive for ARs in the liver, according to the TWC.
This fox was lucky, but the TWC is urging people to refrain from using rodenticides as it can seriously harm and kill animals far beyond its target species.