Donations for Wildlife Conservation

I've been notified by a few people that the below organizations get a lot of publicity and donations, but that there's a whole bunch of small wildlife rehabber organizations, many of them dedicated one-person operations, that really need the help more than the big entities. If you really want to make a difference, do a web search for "wildlife rehabber" + your city, and you can find a local rehabber who would be happy for any help they receive. I've posted a good letter from such a rehabber below.  Hopefully I'll have a list of good rehab places listed soon, or you can just visit wildliferehabber.org.

Wildlife Conservation Society World Wildlife Fund National Wildlife Federation Cheetah Conservation Fund National Wildlife Rehabilitation Hi David, your website is excellent and much needed! If it’s o.k with you I would like to put a link on my site to yours. I guess I only have one comment that I don’t agree with on your site (don’t get mad at me on this one) I think the donation page should change. Those organizations are huge and they all have more money than god. I remember getting the list on profits from non-profit organizations and the CEO of the Wildlife Federation was making 750,000.00 a year. I personally think that is ridiculous and they should be putting that money back into the wildlife and the environmental issues that’s killing so many animals these days, not in their pockets. Personally, if I had a donation area on my site it would be linking to the different actual rehabilitation centers and the individual rehabbers that in most cases don’t get a dime for food, milk replacers, caging, meds and everything else they need to rehab these animals. To give you an example of what rehabbers get: This fall I took in 64 babies which we had a loss of 5 babies out of that, everyone else was released but one squirrel that has to be wintered over. Out of 65 babies I received a total of $55.00 in donations, that’s a little over $1.00 per squirrel, it’s pretty pathetic huh? At least I have this business (which I do love) to support my wildlife efforts, but there are so many individual rehabbers that don’t get any help and they really do need it. And some of the big shot rehab centers (one especially, but I don’t want to state any names) get’s in thousands of dollars, they do the worst rehab in the world, but they sure are good at publicity. Their known for taking the money in and than sending the animals off to the individual rehabbers and not sending along a dime. Someday I would like to be able to take a collection for rehabbers but I wouldn’t know where to start as far as dispersing the money goes. If I ever do get to set up an account for this purpose it would probably start with going to disaster situations like hurricanes and such and send it in product to get to the people that need it the most for rehab. If you need a list of reputable Wildlife Centers that really do need donations I’d be happy to get a list together for you. I hope your not offended by this but I really do feel for the people that are actually helping animals that need it most.