Bella and Charlie Are Not the Problem-It's Us: The Real Causes of Wildlife Rescue in NSW

Public discussion in Australia often presents pet cats as a major cause of wildlife decline, and cat management is frequently promoted as a major conservation response. However, this focus may draw attention away from other common and preventable recorded causes of threatened species rescue. Using the NSW Wildlife Rehabilitation Data Dashboard, we present the first statewide analysis of NSW wildlife rehabilitation records to specifically examine threatened species, rather than pooling threatened and non-threatened wildlife together. This dataset represented 52,475 individuals and 158 threatened species rescued from 2013 to 2024 in NSW. Rehabilitation data represent only animals that are found, reported, and brought into care, mostly in human-frequented environments, and should not be interpreted as estimates of total wildlife mortality, predation pressure, or ecological impact beyond the rehabilitation dataset. Outcomes were often poor: 24.1% were released, 58.5% died, and 17.5% had other recorded outcomes. The largest recorded category was Unknown (21.9%), which should not be interpreted as absence of cause, but as cases where a specific cause could not be assigned at the time of reporting to the dashboard. Among identified recorded causes, the most common were Entanglement (11.6%), Weather Event (11.4%), Abandoned/Orphaned (10.1%), Unsuitable Environment (7.3%), and Motor-Vehicle Collision (5.8%). Together, Unknown and these five identified causes accounted for 68.1% of recorded threatened species rescues. By comparison, all animal attacks combined accounted for 4.4%; dog-related rescues were more than three times as frequent as cat-related rescues, with cat-related rescues comprising 0.6%. These findings show that cat attacks formed a small proportion of recorded rescues, although overall ecological impact cannot be determined from these data. Prevention efforts targeting common and preventable recorded causes may help reduce the number of threatened animals entering care.