Care for Native Animals

The Valerie H. Schindler Wildlife Rehabilitation Center provides free veterinary and rehabilitation services to orphaned and injured native North Carolina animals.

The staff managing this Center believes that compassion, civic responsibility and environmental stewardship are lessons best learned in the company of leaders who embody and practice these values.

The Wildlife Center provides role models, educational programs, volunteer experiences and social interactions that strengthen the human spirit by enriching its capacity to care about animals, about nature and about life itself.

About the Center

• By depending on volunteers and the Zoo's veterinarians, the Center keeps it costs low: We treat and release an average patient for about $40—which is provided through private donations to the Center.

• The Zoo's veterinary staff oversees the care of these animals with extensive support from residents, veterinary interns and veterinary students working on degrees at the N.C. State University College of Veterinary Medicine.
  

• The Center helps more than 1000 native animals every year.

• The Center helps pets, too, by loaning its surgery room, equipment and recover areas to a weekly spay and neuter clinic available to cats and dogs accepted into the Humane Society's adoption and foster care program. The clinic serves about three pets a week—150 animals a year—and helps wildlife by reducing the number of abandoned dogs and cats that can survive only by preying on native animals. The Zoo's veterinarians supervise senior veterinary students, who volunteer to perform the operations.

• The program engages our veterinary staff as role models for these student veterinarians—all from the N.C. State College of Veterinary Medicine—for the Center's other volunteers and for the people of Randolph County who reap the health benefits of the program.

Every donation to the Center helps the Zoo ease the pain and the suffering of an injured North Carolina animal. Individuals who make a donation to the Center become members of the Zoo's Community of Caring—a special group of people who are recognized for their compassion and love of wildlife.

For information about the Schindler Wildlife Rehab center, contact staff members at 336.879.7644 or e-mail zoorehab@nczoo.com. The Center's mailing address is: Valerie H. Schindler Wildlife Rehabilitation Center; 4403 Zoo Parkway; Asheboro,  NC 27205.  

Last modified 10/30/2007 07:54am.