Ray MacLeod - Hope for Wildlife: True Stories of Animal Rescue

T his is a book about wild things in peril and what people have done to help them. It is also the story of a remarkable woman and the organization she founded to provide that help. In it are many successes, a few tragic failures, and chapters that finish somewhere in between or have no end at all. Whatever the outcome, there is always hope. It is the one force that runs through every page, the talisman that gives magic to each tale.

It all began in 1997 when Hope Swinimer founded The Eastern Shore Wildlife Rehabilitation and Rescue Centre. In 2005, the name was changed to Hope for Wildlife Society, and to avoid confusion, that is what it is called in this book. Work done out of the organizations Seaforth base has helped birds, animals, and other wild creatures from every part of Nova Scotia and earned Swinimer the Canadian Wildlife Federations 2008 Roland Michener Award for outstanding achievement in Canadian conservation.

The society is both a group of volunteers and a charity built around those volunteers to help finance their cause. This book takes you inside work with orphaned foxes and injured eagles. It introduces a blind raccoon and a doomed moose. There are stories of a car-crushed turtle that lived, but a spoiled deer that did not. Hope comes to a young bobcat someone mistook for a domestic kitten. An owl that collided with a salt truck gets a new face and another chance at life.

Through everything at Hope for Wildlife run the beliefs of its founder. Hope Swinimer is passionate in all she does, and has given herself a lot to do. Swinimer is a certified veterinary practice manager and holds a full-time job as administrator of the Dartmouth Veterinary Hospital. She recently took over the Halifax city animal pound service, founding Homeward Bound City Pound to run it. Groups all over the province constantly ask her to speak or to lead tours of her Seaforth facility. Universities have sent students, sometimes entire classes, to see how wildlife rehabilitation should be done.

Swinimers work has made her a larger-than-life figure in Nova Scotia, a person whose name and organization are touchstones for care of the provinces wild creatures. Hope for Wildlife is a continuing story with many chapters, including tales that were told, and retold, long before they were discovered by the media or printed here.

One of the reasons Hope Swinimer and her followers attract so much interest is that their adventures tend to start off in one direction, then go in another. For example, when she took the job as administrator for the Dartmouth Veterinary Hospital, Swinimer had no intention of getting involved with wildlife. Hers was to be a life of cats, dogs, and other domestic animals that people keep as pets and companions. These were the ones her doctors worked with. These were also the ones whose owners paid the bills. However, she found herself more and more drawn to injuries veterinarians did not deal with, such as the backyard blue jay that collided with a window or the porcupine with legs broken by a pickup truck.

One day in 1993, a couple who had run over a skunk brought it to Swinimers workplace. The veterinarians could not look after the animal so she decided to take it home and do it herself, and that was how her wildlife rehabilitation started. Under her care, the skunk recovered, but was blind in one eye and could not be released. Instead, Swinimer decided to use the animal she called Zorro to teach Nova Scotians about their native wildlife. Of course, to prepare a skunk to meet the public, it had to be de-scented, which segued into the unexpected element of this tale, the part people still talk about in veterinary circles when the topic of skunk surgery is evoked.

Zorro, Hope Swinimers first rehabilitated animal, is a legend at the Dartmouth Veterinary Hospital and in a certain veterinarians household. Who knew musk glands were worse out than in?

Swinimer decided Zorros anal musk glands had to be removed, and found no veterinarian willing to help. Finally, she badgered Dr. Ian McKay at her hospital to try. People would learn in time that letting Hope Swinimer talk them into things could have unforeseen results. McKay agreed to do the de-scenting despite warnings from his colleagues.