What to Do If You Find an Injured Animal

If you’ve come across an injured animal, you’ll probably want to do everything you can to help it. If you’re an animal lover, your desire to help is there whether it’s a wild bird or someone’s obviously tame cat that’s in distress. What to do if you find an injured animal? This article is here to help.

We spoke to Carolyn Press-McKenzie, the founder of New Zealand’s leading no-kill shelter HUHA to find out how to do your part when it comes to helping injured animals.

What to do if you find an injured animal

If you see an injured animal, there’s probably loads of questions running through your head. Should you move them? What if they’re scared or aggressive? What if they’re actually not hurt but just lost?

Carolyn says that the first step should always be to assess the safety of everyone involved. Check if the animal is near busy roads or in immediate danger, and whether you can get to the animal without risking your own safety.

Next, you’ll want to call in the professionals to help. By this we mean an organisation like HUHA or your local animal shelter or animal welfare organisation. Even a local vet should be able to give you advice and possibly come out and assist you.

If you can, sending a photo and/or video is really helpful for animal welfare professionals. Then, they can assess the situation more quickly and accurately than they can just via phone call. On top of being able to devise a plan of action for when they arrive and immediately assess whether the animal is in an urgent or life-threatening situation, they can give you any necessary instructions to help stabilise the animal or provide emergency care.

If it is safe, and depending on area, assess if the animal needs to be moved before the professionals arrive. If this isn’t completely necessary, it’s best to wait for them. Even very tame and friendly animals can react badly when in shock and pain, so they might be scared or aggressive.

The last thing you want is for the animal to bolt or for you to get hurt trying to help it. Or for you to hurt it unintentionally.

Helping injured animals with pet first aid

Pet first aid courses are a valuable thing to attend, Carolyn says. They will teach you the basics of animal care, which could potentially save an animal’s life if correctly applied. You’ll learn important skills like how to stop bleeding, stabilise breaks, get animals into vehicles, and so on so that you can get an animal to a professional more safely and easily.

And if you have an animal at home, a course like this will no doubt come in handy. You never know what mischief your pet will get itself into over time.

Keeping basic animal first aid equipment in your car means you’re better prepared for any emergencies you might encounter. Carolyn notes a human first aid kit can usually do double duty, as many items can be used for both. Anyone with small, accident-prone children will be able to confirm!

Some useful items to include in your pet first aid toolkit include:

• Gauze for a wound cover but also to fashion a soft, makeshift muzzle if needed
• Bandages to stabilise breaks or to control bleeding
• Towels for picking up or transporting an animal, to stop bleeding, or to warm an animal who is in shock
• A carry cage is a great thing to keep in your car for picking up injured animals including wildlife. If you can’t feasibly keep a carry cage in your car though, towels are a good substitute
  

Important things you need to know about helping injured animals

In knowing what to do if you find an injured animal, Carolyn says there are two main things to be aware of when it comes to emergency treatment. The first is the need to clear the animal’s airway and remove anything that might block it.

The second is that animals need to be kept warm, especially after an injury. They go into shock very quickly.

Hypothermia is particularly serious in animals, especially young animals. Using a towel or similar to try keeping an injured animal warm and comfortable could be key to saving its life. If the injured animal you’ve found looks in bad shape, make sure to mention this when calling the professionals and they’ll be able to give you advice on how to manage shock.

If the animal needs medical treatment, who pays the vet bill? Carolyn says if you take an animal into a vet clinic, generally vets do have a duty of care so should stabilise the animal and give pain relief and basic assistance. The same obviously applies to an animal shelter like HUHA.

Generally, if it’s a domesticated animal, it’s held onsite as the search for the owner commences. As a first step, almost all vets and shelters will check for a microchip to see if they can find an owner. That’s why it’s so important that your pets are microchipped. Read why in our two articles on it:

HUHA does everything it can to treat the animal and incurs the costs. If an owner does come forward, it will then try to make payment arrangements with the (hopefully grateful!) owner. In these instances, pet insurance can be another reason for huge relief…right after finding your beloved girl or boy safe and well.

Insurance means your injured pet can be treated

If your pet were to somehow get lost and become injured, it would be good to know that should a kind passer-by take them to a vet or animal shelter, the medical bill wouldn’t be too hard to swallow.

Taking out pet insurance means that if the worst happens and your pet gets injured, you can focus on helping them get better rather than working 17 jobs to pay for the vet bills!