TWC's Wildlife Hotline: 416-631-0662

Wildlife situations can happen anywhere, anytime, and can involve anyone. TWC’s Wildlife Hotline receives calls about a wide variety of situations, from encounters with sick or injured animals, to animals suspected to be orphaned, to wildlife conflict situations, to cases where emergency wildlife rescue is required, to general inquiries about the natural history of Ontario’s wildlife. To ensure that our ongoing goal of helping people find humane, mutually beneficial solutions to wildlife situations is met, each situation is carefully assessed by experienced and trained individuals who undergo intensive training for more than a year.  

The Wildlife Hotline provides customized, accurate and professional information to every single caller while meeting five main objectives:

1. Responding to calls about sick, injured and orphaned wild animals and identifying the appropriate course of action based on the animal’s behaviour, life stage, natural history and current situation.

2. Providing free advice on how to resolve human-wildlife conflict and nuisance situations humanely and effectively.

3. Acting as a resource for information about wildlife and wildlife-related issues.

4. Coordinating wildlife rescues.

5. Helping people understand the interdependence between wildlife, humans and environmental health.

TWC’s Wildlife Hotline operates like a triage system at a hospital – all callers leave a message, which is then entered into a custom-made database. Calls are then returned in order of urgency. With tens of thousands of calls coming in to the centre, and only a small handful of staff trained to return calls, this system ensures the best use of resources (e.g. the most urgent calls are being returned by the most highly trained staff).