Really hate articles that tell you to find a professional for injured animals. More often than not, that means they kill the babies so they aren’t contaminated by contact with people. When I took in a baby robin, it was almost impossible to find out how to feed it because all the articles said it was illegal in our state to save the life of a baby and were afraid to tell how to care for it. My neighbor called for a goose that followed her and took food. The “professionals” came and killed it because it was too people oriented. She naively thought they were going to take it to a pond with other geese. I find that arrogance that only their opinions on the “right” attitude toward wildlife are the right attitudes as upsetting as their attitudes toward politics.
Blame the people for when animals get too familiar with humans. Being too familiar makes it often too dangerous, because the animal still has its instincts.
The exceptions I would make is for anything that can be domesticated enough in skilled hands to live in the house of its owner.
YouTube has plenty of informative rescue videos posted by people who wound up saving young, orphaned wild animals. As you might expect, those rescuers did not take kindly to the people -- leftists, I suspect -- who wanted to kill those animals "for their own good." The rescuers often successfully reintroduced their adoptees to the wild.
I’ve worked in wildlife rehab. We never killed the animals.
The ones who killed the goose were likely state wildlife officers. They do sometimes kill animals they think are nuisance animals.
The animals should be taken to a licensed wildlife rehabber so they can be properly fed and handled so they can make it in the wild and fend for themslves. Often, it is done in stages with one rehabber handling early stages and another “wilding” them. In my state, the licensed rehabbers are volunteers and very, very good and truly love the animals and know what they are doing.
Too often, amateurs release animals which have not been properly “wilded” and they can be too tame, look to humans for food, and become nuisance animals — then someone calls the state wildlife officers and yes, they kill them. Or the animal cannot fend for itself and starves or meets an untimely end.
Mammals that can carry rabies must be vaccinated and released at a proper location per federal guidelines to block spread of rabies among wildlife. In addition to being taught to find their own food, baby robins (and a number of other birds) need to be acclimated to the night sky so they can migrate in the fall. If an amateur keeps the baby inside all night, well, it won’t make it. Properly raising a baby animal to make it in the wild is not as simple as it seems.
So, if you want the animal to live a good life, call the rehabbers, not the state wildlife officers. They will take good care of it. The state wildlife officers well might kill it.