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AMARILLO, Texas (KFDA) – Chevron Phillips reached out to Wild West Wildlife Rehabilitation Center wanting to make a difference.
Chevron Phillips recently hosted it’s Summer of Safety campaign and wanted to raise money to help the community. The company’s employees decided to volunteer at Wild West Wildlife, specifically helping with injured opossums.
“We wanted to do some community outreach and West Wildlife does so much to help us out with the animals that are stray in our plant that we wanted to give back to them and help build an opossum enclosure. So we’ve been raising money all summer to help them out with this,” said Rory Martin, safety technician at Chevron Phillips.
Wild West Wildlife says an opossum enclosure was needed. The center takes in over 600 opossums every year with most injured from dog attacks.
“Opossums are the good guys in our environment. So they are the clean up crew on the ground. You got your vultures the clean up crew in the sky, and you’ve got those guys on the ground. They are opportunistic eaters and omnivores,” said Stephanie Brady, founder and executive director at Wild West Wildlife Rehabilitation Center.
Opossums eat snakes, ticks, insects and even trash left out outside.
“The cool things about this is you don’t have to worry about rabies with them. It’s extremely rare because their body temperature runs so low and it’s around 96 degrees. The whole drooling and hissing, that’s the only way they can look kind of scary for people to leave them alone. But they aren’t fighters,” said Brady.
The center says the enclosures are used to give an animal time to get used to the outside world prior to release.
“We’re going to spend about the next seven to eight hours out here working on this thing. And we aren’t going to leave until it’s done and painted and we are ready to move some opossums in,” said Martin.
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