DALLAS – Rosie has had a rough life.
Her parents abandoned Rosie and her brothers and sisters, making them orphans. They were split up and sent to other families that tried to care for them. After being shuffled from one home to another, Rosie was recently checked into rehab, where she is undergoing treatment.
Rosie is not a juvenile delinquent, drug addict, or even washed-up pop star. Rosie is a raccoon, taken from a chimney by well-meaning but uninformed humans, who thought she and her siblings could become pets.
Today, Rosie is under the care of licensed wildlife rehabilitator Bonnie Bradshaw, who nurses raccoons back to health. That’s a humanitarian pursuit, but she also owns 911 Wildlife, a licensed pest control service that helps humans deal with any species of wildlife in a safe, humane way.
“Our main mission is to prevent animals from being injured or orphaned, so unlike other pest control companies, we are willing to come out for free and help a person solve a problem at no charge,” Bradshaw said. “If they pay us to do the eviction and exclusion work, we give them a 10-year guarantee.”
Relocation, Bradshaw says, hurts animals more. When animals are released into the wild, they normally are dropped in an unfamiliar area controlled by another, dominant animal. This can cause a competition for food and other resources that the newly relocated animal cannot win.
911 Wildlife responds regularly to calls about raccoons, possums, bobcats, squirrels, armadillos, coyotes, birds and other North Texas wildlife, but the hardest calls Bradshaw gets come from people who take in these animals as pets and go to extreme measures to tame them.
Bradshaw has seen animals with claws and teeth removed.
“If you have to mutilate an animal to make it a pet, that should be a sign,” she said. “It becomes a very, very sad situation; they are never tame.”