Guest Review by Ned Gentz, MS, DVM, DACZM, Albuquerque Biological Park, Albuquerque, NM, USA (Click on stars for an explanation)

You may purchase this book on Amazon.com.

Those of us in the animal business are often expected to have expertise in raising infant mammals. Sometimes this is the case; other times it is not.  This nifty new volume gives us the knowledge we need. Chapter authors include over thirty veterinarians, veterinary technicians, and wildlife rehabilitators. More than 50 different species of domestic, farm, wildlife, and zoo mammals are covered - from puppies and kittens to goats and pigs to sloths and bats.

The book benefits from using the same basic format for each chapter. Topics covered for each species include natural history, criteria for intervention, record keeping, equipment, formulas, what to feed initially, nursing techniques, frequency of feeding, amounts to feed, expected weight gain, housing needs, immune status, time to weaning, tips for weaning, and common medical problems.

As with any multi-author text, some chapters are better than others. (The camelid chapter, for example, seems to be a little lean.) It should also be noted that hundreds of opossums are successfully raised every year on diets other than the one insistently recommended in the opossum chapter. Where included, photos are interesting and useful, and a lot of the helpful data and information appear in tables. An appendix listing the source of infant-raising supplies is particularly useful.

This affordable book is an extremely welcome addition to the literature, because it has collected a great big bunch of scattered and disparate information into one handy location. This book was a great idea - well-conceived and well-executed. I recommend this book highly to any veterinarian, technician, biologist, or rehabilitator involved at any level in the raising of orphaned infant mammals.

Blackwell Publishing (2002). 

279 pages.

ISBN: 9780813826837.