Welcome to Gaia! ::

So this is an issue I've been relatively curious about. Since I am not vegan, I was wondering what your opinions are on this:

I have been volunteering at a local wildlife rehabilitation center for a little over a year now. We rehabilitate everything from squirrels, raccoons, and songbirds to bobcats, coyotes, and birds of prey. For the latter, since these animals are going to be released in the wild, they have to eat meat.

There are several different things we do. We keep a large breeder stock of rats and mice in an outside garage. They're fed and watered every single day, occasionally with a little treat like baby carrots, apples, or grapes, and their cages are cleaned 2-3 times a week. A cage (typically an aquarium tank or large plastic tote) may hold from 2 rats and mice to over 20. We keep them continually breeding so as to keep a full stock to prevent having to buy the rodents, as the amount of wildlife we get each year (over 400 animals) can make such a purchase quite expensive, considering on average we would feed out 12-15 mice a day and up to 8 rats a day. I'll admit that some of the cages can get quite dirty with the more rats that are in there and sometimes some of the cages get a little over crowded, but this is usually due to poor volunteer care, and fortunately it's not very common at all. But I digress.

With the rats and mice we either:
*Gas (CO2) in a bucket and feed out to the birds fresh or refrigerate for later
*Feed them out live to the birds to encourage hunting behaviour.

Now, with the larger mammals and the big birds of prey (the bald eagle or vultures, for instance), we can't afford to keep feeding out our rats. So we depend on meat donations from local people. Of course, this isn't very common, and the meat we tend to get is rotten or can't be used (none of our animals will eat ham except maybe the opossums (and that's only because they'll eat anything)). Occasionally we'll get a deer carcass from roadkill and butcher that up, but not all our animals will eat venison. This is when we resort to bags of Tyson (I think?) chicken thighs that has to be purchased by the owner at the grocery store. We probably use half a bag a day, but the principle is that it's factory-processed chicken. We obviously can't go organic because that's too expensive, and it's quite apparent that we can't just not buy it, or the animals would die.

So sorry for the wall of text, but I was just curious as to what you thought about this or if you had suggestions or comments on what you think might be done better or if you would give something like this a special exception to the veg*n ethical "rules."

I completely agree. However, I still don't understand why people buy vegan dog and cat food for their pets. The factory processed chicken is another thing I was curious about.

Thanks for the reply, glad I finally got one! xD