WILD & WOUNDED
Animal hospital tackles Paris's wild animal casualties
MAISONS-ALFORT, FRANCE Oxygen pumped through a tube in the intensive care unit, as the hospital director flipped through a medical chart and whispered the details of the intake to keep from disturbing the patient: a hedgehog.
Like so many of the creatures that end up here at Faune Alfort, the Paris region's only hospital that cares for all wild animals, this hedgehog had run afoul of the urban environment. It had been found stuck, with a wounded paw, in a garden fence.
Last year a record 7,730 animals representing 121 different species passed through the doors of the hospital, housed within a veterinary school on the outskirts of Paris. That number has been rising each year, as the expanding French capital has overtaken animal habitats, and as wildlife has sought — and sometimes struggled — to adapt to city life.
“You don't have to go to the other end of the world to meet wild animals,” said Céline Grisot, the director, dressed in an olive-green lab coat. “They're increasingly present in urban areas, because these wild animals come to find refuge when there's no more room for them, because their territory is being encroached upon. These animals have a surprising capacity for resilience.”
Whether it's boars in Rome and Japan, otters in Singapore, leopards in Mumbai or the ubiquitous urban foxes of London, wild animals have been learning to live side by side with, and often just out of sight of, humans.
The Paris program is animated by the idea that the city's inhabitants and veterinarians need to be looking beyond pets and caring for the wildlife in their midst, too.
Injured and sick animals admitted to Faune Alfort receive medical care at the hospital and then rehabilitation in an enclosure or aviary. The goal is to get them ready for release — back where they were found, or another suitable habitat.
In the interest of their long-term survival, they should leave with a healthy fear of people intact. So the centre staff and volunteers try to help them heal while minimizing human interaction.
Down the hall from the hedgehog, staff fed trilling birds — no bigger than the palm of a hand — with syringes. One recuperating bird escaped the hands of a caretaker and alighted on top of a shelf.
Two ducklings paddled in a water-filled sink with a fluffy grey gosling that had been abandoned by its mother. When older, the gosling would have to be separated from the ducklings, so as not to confuse its natural instincts, but for the moment it had found a temporary family.
Grey herons, tawny owls, bats, seagulls, groundhogs, badgers, rabbits and even the occasional fox or boar from the suburbs have been treated at the hospital. Swans limping around Paris's Luxembourg Gardens and baby pigeons abandoned along the Seine riverbanks will end up here.
The reasons for these animals' hospitalizations varies widely: many are babies, some have been hit by cars or attacked by predators. Throughout her eight years with Faune Alfort — first as a volunteer, then as an employee and now as director — Grisot recalls having seen animals caught in leg traps (despite having been outlawed in France since the 1990s), hawks with multiple wing fractures and protected species with bullet wounds that go on to survive multiple surgeries before being released back to the wild.
On top of the city moving into these animals' habitats, there is also the effect of a changing climate and many of its casualties end up at Grisot's door. She rattled off a few examples, including a Saharan sandstorm that lashed Paris in 2022, destroying many swallow nests; soaring heat-wave temperatures that had baby swifts plunging out of their nests to the sidewalk seeking relief; and hedgehogs waking too early from hibernation because of mild temperatures and unable to find enough food.
Staff spoke softly to keep the animals calm, so the only sounds were the squawks, chirps and warbles of the birds, and the crunching and rustling of animals eating breakfast. Farther down the hall from the small birds is the raptors' room, which on this particular day was home to a partridge, a crow, a buzzard, an owl and a greenfinch — all kept in separate, locker-sized cages.
Beyond the bustle of cleaning wounds and hand-feeding animals — some of the babies need to be fed every one to two hours — there's the sheer amount of housekeeping that goes into caring for this many animals. The washing machine is always running, Grisot said, to ensure there are enough clean towels.
Steel shelves are lined nearly to the ceiling with food bowls of all shapes and sizes, labelled “pigeons,” “hedgehogs,” “magpies” and so on.
The fridge is stocked with dead mice and worms. Sacks of pellets and other grains line another wall of a storage room. There's even a plastic tub filled with stale baguettes.
Veterinary students and volunteers support the small team caring for thousands of animals each year.
The hospital, which occupies a narrow wing of space up several flights of stairs on the far edge of the sprawling campus of the capital's veterinary school, received just 20,000 euros from the municipality in 2023 and maintains a precarious existence relying on donations and sponsorships.
About 90 per cent of the animals are brought here not by animal-control officers but by Parisians or suburb-dwellers who notice an animal in distress and try to help, swaddling a fox in towels or nestling a bird in a shoebox and delivering it here.
Grisot said sometimes it can be difficult to see her team's impact. “We put on little Band-aids. That's all we can do,” she said.
Real change, she said, would require humans to conceive of themselves in an entirely different way: to understand that they are one animal of many living in the city of Paris, coexisting with dozens of species on any given day.
“When you look at Paris from the sky, as soon as you move away from the centre, you're surrounded by forests and green areas,” she said. “We have to become humbler and make an effort to have as little impact as possible on the environment.”
When you look at Paris from the sky, as soon as you move away from the centre, you're surrounded by forests and green areas.