CHEYENNE — Pulling into the driveway at the Broken Bandit Wildlife Center east of Wyoming’s capital city, visitors first notice a relatively normal collection of animals, at least by Cowboy State standards.
Huge, mellow draft horses wander about their corrals while a lone donkey cuts loose with a loud bray from his enclosure.
A bird enclosure holds a bunch of chickens, including roosters that repeatedly crow at the arrival of newcomers. And there’s a gigantic turkey, too.
“We call that the ‘veloci-turkey,’” wildlife center director Patricia Wyer told Cowboy State Daily during a visit last Sunday, a nod to the fearsome velociraptor dinosaurs in the “Jurassic Park” films.
Critters From All Over
But it’s inside Wyer’s “critter building” where things get different.
Along the east wall, an enclosure full of coatimundi — members of the raccoon family native to South America — clambered all over, some of them even climbing upside down across the top.
They greeted newcomers with bright eyes and long snouts, hoping for attention and maybe some treats. Their snouts are handy to probe for food in their natural environment, Wyer explained.
Along the opposite wall, a gaggle of North American raccoons waited patiently for their turn. Visitors are allowed into their enclosure with treats.
And the raccoons reached out gently, with incredible politeness, to accept treats from a visitor’s hands.
Toward the middle of the building was an enclosure occupied by Mickey, a South American crab-eating raccoon. She looks much like her North American cousins, except with short hair and darker coloring.
Strangers aren’t allowed inside with her, Wyer explained. She’s incredibly quick and strong, and likes to snatch whatever she can get her paws on, then refuse to give it back.
And indeed, she did her best to reach through the stout wire of her enclosure to grab a loose coat or pull a notebook out of a visitor’s back pocket.
“I think she was a stripper in a past life,” Wyer said. “She’s an amazing contortionist.”
There’s also Stinkerbell, a chunky skunk that likes to be picked up and cuddled by Valarie Fish, one of Wyer’s volunteer helpers.
Vixen, a blind fox, has her own enclosure outside. When some visitors approached, she started darting back and forth.
That made her appear to be nervous. But Wyer said she does it because she can’t see and the quick movements are to pick up everybody’s scent.
The visit ended by dropping in on Bob and Cat, a pair of bobcats that live inside Wyler’s house full-time. But with strangers around, they had to stay inside their cage.
“They might look cute and friendly, but they’d bite you if they could,” Wyer said.
A Big Heart For Animals
Wyler has been in the animal rescue business for about 15 years. It’s not really something she did on purpose. Instead, she just sort of fell into it after she started taking in some wayward raccoons, and it grew from there.
She’s had to absorb reams of knowledge about the special needs of animals of all sorts and must be licensed by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department and other agencies to keep many of the animals onsite.
It’s become more than a full-time job. And Wyer recently took on even more when she agreed to partner with a Montana-based draft horse rescue to take in some of the massive horses.
The Broken Bandit relies on donations and volunteers.
“I could never, ever do this without the help of my volunteers,” Wyler said.
Fish said she found out about Broken Bandit when she and her husband found a young raccoon on their property.
“We didn’t know what we were supposed to do with her,” but then somebody suggested taking the raccoon to Broken Bandit, and Fish has been hooked on helping with the animals ever since, she said.
The Result Of Bad Decisions
With native species such as North American raccoons, the goal of Broken Bandit is rehabilitation and return to the wild whenever possible, Wyer said.
For some native animals, such as Vixen, a disability makes that impossible, so they’ll live out the rest of their lives on her property.
Others might have to stay permanently because they’ve become too acclimated to confined life and dependent upon the help of Wyer and the volunteers.
The exotic species, such as coatimundi, also are permanent residents.
They have an “outside play area” that they can access through a pet door. But they could never survive living outside permanently in Wyoming’s cold climate, Wyer said.
Most of the exotic animals came to Broken Bandit because people tried to adopt them as pets and had no idea what they were getting into, Wyer said.
“There’s so much more to properly caring for these types of animals than people can imagine,” she said.
The native critters that recover well enough to go back to the wild are released on private property, she said.
“We have contracts with farmers who will take certain types of animals,” Wyer said.
Broken Bandit recently said goodbye to a porcupine named Fred that had a hard time understanding why people didn’t want to cuddle him, Wyer said.
“He was so friendly. He was always trying to come up to people and hug their legs,” she said.
Big House Cats
Bob and Cat were “wild born,” but the Game and Fish has decided that they can’t be released back into the wild, Wyer said.
That’s because they’ve been completely raised in captivity, so they couldn’t survive. Their mother was preying on livestock, and was shot, she said.
“The ranchers had every right to defend their livestock, but they didn’t realize until it was too late that the bobcat had two baby kittens, or they wouldn’t have shot her,” Wyer said.
Now fully grown, Bob and Cat live full-time indoors. And yes, they’re litter box trained, Wyer said.
“They don’t get to go outside. I’m afraid if we ever let them out of the house, we’d never get them back,” she said.
In a lot of ways, they’re just house cats — really big, strong, energetic house cats.
“They will scale right up the walls, and push the couch around,” Wyer said.
Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.
