From an early age, Rochelle Wood loved animals.
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“I’ve always had animals and always brought animals home, much to my parents’ dismay,” Ms Wood, of Wickham, said.
“I brought home anything and everything I’d find.
“I was always the one that found the little bird that had fallen out of the nest and brought it home.”
Ms Wood recalled finding a kitten in the drain when she was little.
“I had just about everyone in the whole street there to get it out,” she said.
She was notorious for taking birds out of cages.
“Birds are meant to fly.
“I hate to see birds in cages. I understand that they’re pets, but people just shove them in a cage and leave them there.
“They should get them out, interact with them and let them fly around a bit.”
When she was 16, she was asked at school to dissect rats in biology class.
Before this, the class studied reproduction by keeping rats that had babies.
“A month later they said we’d be cutting rats up,” she said.
Ms Wood was horrified.
“That’s when I got involved with Animal Liberation and the Humane Society.
“They provided the school with a model of a mouse. I was allowed to do my assessment on that fake wooden model, which had body parts.”
Ms Wood, who this week is the Herald’s Hunter Hero, has been involved in native animal rescue and caring for the past 20 years.
She’s rescued thousands of sick and injured animals, including birds, lizards, possums and turtles.
She also rescues cats and runs a Facebook page called The Stray Cats Project.
“Most rescuers will pick up and rehome kittens, but there’s still a stray, undesexed female cat out there somewhere,” she said.
“So I started trapping the stray cats and desexing them.”
Ms Wood has four cats, which she keeps inside because of the risk of them killing native animals.
She reckons cats get a bad rap.
“When you look at what humans do to the animals and environment, like mining, gas, urban sprawl – we haven’t got anything on cats.
“When humans stop doing all the damage they do, then talk to me about cats.”
She believes humans should look at themselves.
“We base what we think is good on human values. We think that if something isn’t as smart as us, it’s not as good as us.”
“Who’s to say the best attributes you can have aren’t something like flying or being able to travel like a whale does around the world, up and down the coast?”
She wished humans thought more about “making their footprint as light as they can”.
“We share this world with so many other creatures.”
Nominate a Hunter Hero with an email to community@theherald.com.au.
