In her weakened condition, are you fairly confident she would have the strength to feed herself after the release? And secondly, was there not some way you could have "given" her a feed to help her get her strength up enough to continue to feed herself up on her own? I don't know how different marine mammals are from rescued land mammals, but we always make sure they have a good feed before release to improve their survival chances when they are that emaciated.
In this situation our only real option was to free the sea lion from the entanglement and hope for the best for her. Under other circumstances she might have been brought into a care facility for rehabilitation but that wasn't an option here - there was no practical way to get her out of the cave. It's very unlikely she would have eaten any food offered to her during our response anyway. She clearly wanted to get away from us a soon as she was cut free.
In her weakened condition, are you fairly confident she would have the strength to feed herself after the release? And secondly, was there not some way you could have "given" her a feed to help her get her strength up enough to continue to feed herself up on her own? I don't know how different marine mammals are from rescued land mammals, but we always make sure they have a good feed before release to improve their survival chances when they are that emaciated.
Oreocremerocks 1 year ago
@Oreocremerocks
In this situation our only real option was to free the sea lion from the entanglement and hope for the best for her. Under other circumstances she might have been brought into a care facility for rehabilitation but that wasn't an option here - there was no practical way to get her out of the cave. It's very unlikely she would have eaten any food offered to her during our response anyway. She clearly wanted to get away from us a soon as she was cut free.
goodrice4 1 year ago