In a world that treats foxes as either fur or folly, Mikayla Raines saw something else entirely: Sentience.
Not the cartoonish cleverness of folklore, nor the soft luxury of fashion, but the quiet, confused lives of animals bred to die or discarded as inconvenient pets. From the age of 15, when she bottle-fed her first fox, she was drawn to their wild complexity. Skittish, solitary, destructive—foxes do not make easy companions. But that was part of the point. She loved them not in spite of who they were, but because of it.
Ms. Raines founded Save a Fox Rescue in 2017, after receiving her wildlife rehabilitation license and training as a veterinary technician. Her sanctuaries in Minnesota and later Florida became unusual havens for animals trapped by human contradiction: bred in captivity but illegal to release, unsellable for fur but unfit for the wild. She saved them anyway—thousands over the years—many through painstaking work with fur farms she refused to vilify, preferring collaboration over condemnation.
This was not glamorous work. Her days were filled with paperwork, permit battles, fundraisers, and grief. She mourned every animal she couldn’t save. She was autistic, and often struggled with depression and borderline personality disorder, a combination that made the brutal unpredictability of rescue work especially difficult. But her sensitivity, her husband said, was also her gift: she could intuit distress before it was spoken, in people and in animals alike.
In the end, the burden proved too heavy. Harassment from online detractors, exhaustion from years of emotional labor, and the sheer relentlessness of care wore her down. She died by suicide on June 20th.
She is survived by her husband, Ethan, their 3-year-old daughter Freya, her mother Sandi, and the many creatures she gave a chance at life.
Header image: Mikayla Raines. Photo courtesy of Save a Fox Rescue
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This story first appeared on Mongabay
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