Sydney University raising funds for saving bushfire-affected animals

15 / 01 / 2020

By Marwa Nassar - -

The Sydney University launched a dedicated crowdfunding campaign to enable the community to provide financial contributions to help the university increase its current veterinary services for wildlife, livestock and companion animals affected by the Australia bushfire.

Professor Frazer Allan, Head of Sydney School of Veterinary Science said, “The Sydney School of Veterinary Science and the wider University has a wealth of knowledge and resources that it can and has used to help wildlife impacted by the bushfire crisis. We are working with lead agencies such as the RSPCA, NSW Department of Primary Industries and WIRES to ensure our work is coordinated with that of others.”

“We welcome the public’s support in helping us to use our expertise and services to do whatever we can to both assist the vets and other professionals treating animals as well as using our own clinics to treat affected animals.”

The university’s Vice-Chancellor has acknowledged the role the university has to play “in making our expertise available to governments and communities in our efforts to rebuild and attempt to prevent serious recurrence of the bushfires.”

Professor Christopher Dickman, from the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Science has said the fire killed more than one billion animals.

Professor Dickman said, “I think there’s nothing quite to compare with the devastation that’s going on over such a large area so quickly. It’s a monstrous event in terms of geography and the number of individual animals affected.”

“We know that Australian biodiversity has been going down over the last several decades, and it’s probably fairly well known that Australia’s got the world’s highest rate of extinction for mammals. It’s events like this that may well hasten the extinction process for a range of other species. So, it’s a very sad time.”

“What we’re seeing are the effects of climate change. Sometimes, it’s said that Australia is the canary in the coal mine with the effects of climate change being seen here most severely and earliest… We’re probably looking at what climate change may look like for other parts of the world in the first stages in Australia at the moment,” said Professor Dickman from the Faculty of Science.

“I think there is a feeling among environmental scientists and ecologists in Australia that we’ve been frozen out of the debate, certainly out of policymaking. I think it’s now time to bring the scientists back into the tent to look at what is likely to be happening over the next few decades and to think about how we can maintain both the human community in good health and as much biodiversity as can be retained under this evolving situation.”

Professor Dickman explains that animals that survive the fires in the first instance by fleeing or going underground will return or re-emerge into areas that don’t have the resources to support them. Others will fall victim to introduced predators such as feral cats and red foxes. Even for those birds or animals able to flee to unaffected areas they will rarely be able to successfully compete with animals already living there and succumb within a short time.