DECATUR, Ill. (AP) - Eleven-year-old Mason Spiker and his sister Hailey, 12, don’t like to see animals suffer.
So when they found a plump but dazed wild rabbit with a trailing back leg near their Decatur home, they decided to hop to it and help.
“We thought the rabbit must have got hit by a car,” says Hailey. “And we don’t like to see animals die,” adds her brother. “And we don’t like to see animals hurt.”
Being kids, they engaged the standard childhood crisis intervention modality and alerted their mom, Tabatha Spiker, 34.
“I’ve always told them to treat things the way you would like to be treated,” she explains. “Even though they are animals, they still feel, and they can’t say, ’Help me.’ We’ve got to look out for them.”
The Spiker family took the lame bunny inside to care for it as best they could while Mom jumped around the phone book, seeking expert assistance. She finally found salvation in the shape of the Warrensburg-based Prairie Wildlife Rehabilitation facility run by Mary Rotz.
She came and collected the rabbit March 12 and recently surprised the Spikers by informing them they had not saved one rabbit but six - injured mommy rabbit had given birth to five babies. “When the kids came home from school, and I told them, I was crying,” says Tabatha Spiker. “I am like, ’This is so cool…’ “
Rotz nursed Mom back to health and has since released her, explaining the gimpy leg never quite got back to full function but worked well enough. “You couldn’t catch her,” she says. “Even though she only had three-and-a-half functional legs.”
Mommy rabbit wasn’t interested in caring for her babies, a common complication with rescued wildlife, and so Rotz took care of them using a special bunny milk formula. She also has possum formula, beaver, deer and so on.
After three weeks, the babies were munching greenery and ready to re-enter our wild America. The fact that Mother Nature, red in tooth and claw, might only see them as furry entrees is beside the point in the gospel of being, according to Rotz.
“I have a high respect for rabbits and for mice,” says the 65-year-old rehabilitator. “They feed everything, and in returning them to nature you are returning them to the job they are designed to do. God never made a useless animal.”
And Rotz should know, she’s fixed up so many of them. From mighty birds of prey to squirrels, rabbits, deer, song birds and about everything that ever flew, ran or crawled in Illinois and then suddenly found itself down on its luck, the ever-cheerful Rotz has been healing them and returning them to the wild for 27 years.
She has state and federal licenses and a dependable right hand in the shape of her volunteer helper, Buffy Stone, who has been assisting for 11 years.
Prairie Wildlife Rehabilitation gets by on donations and in-kind help from groups such as the Boy Scouts, but saving creation weighs heavily on anyone’s shoulders.
Rotz thought seriously about quitting two years ago when rehabilitating herself from a bout with an aggressive cancer involved 66 radiation treatments and waking up every day as sick as anything in her cages. And yet Rotz chose to persist, determined to save herself so she could save everything else.
She explains that the stalwart support of her husband, retired champion jockey John Rotz, and her silent but unflinching assistant (Stone is deaf but has taught Rotz to sign) helped carry her through the tough times. Occasionally meeting families like the Spikers is another source of continuing inspiration.
“To step outside our regular lives to help the other beings that share our planet is wonderful, and I really applaud them for doing that, and it encourages me,” she says. “And those bunnies, now matter how long any particular one of them lives, will reproduce and have young and those young will reproduce and on and on and on. So it’s like the good that family did will live forever; it will never die.”
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Source: The (Decatur) Herald & Review, https://bit.ly/1kfl0uP
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