06/25/2025
Hey friends…As we know many of you follow lots of animal rescues and rescue related pages, we know a lot of you have probably seen the news about Mikayla Raines, the founder of Save A Fox Rescue, who tragically took her own life in the last few days. On a personal level, this hits very close to home for FLDR as one of our fosters has rescue foxes from Save A Fox, we work closely another rescue that has foxes from Save A Fox and I have personally been to Save A Fox South to deliver supply donations and have witnessed first hand their amazing rescue efforts. Our hearts are shattered and there are not adequate words to express our sadness - for her husband and daughter, for her personal pets, for all the foxes and other animals she saved - and for all of the ones who may now never know safety as another rescuer is lost. Rescue is HARD. It is emotionally and physically exhausting. Rescue should always involve cooperation and not be a competition. Sadly, that is often not the case. At FLDR we have had to accept that not everyone will agree with our efforts and often that comes with snide comments, complaints, accusations and harsh words, but we try to just brush them off and move along - knowing we are doing the best we can for all the pups in our care and that they are what is most important. It’s rarely ever the animals that drive rescuers out of rescue (or worse)….it’s the humans. Since last fall, you may have noticed a decrease in our postings on social media and wondered why. Welp, it is a direct result of bullies and trolls having something to yell and complain about no matter what we did or posted. It became such an issue that we couldn’t post unless we had a page administrator (or two) who could monitor the comments for the day of the post and be fully ready to delete and block (something we never used to have to do). Emotionally stressful doesn’t quite begin to cover it, but we thought we had it somewhat under control….until we made a post about an event we attended and somehow wound up on the hateful side of the social media algorithms and things spiraled fast. At one point we had to get authorities involved over some threats that were made, posing potential impacts to the safety of the pups and the humans at FLDR. Add in some personal events that a few of our team were experiencing (two of us lost our moms within just a few months of each other), an increasing number of pups needing rescue, a decrease in available fosters available (for a variety of reasons) and posting on social media, even the most benign types of posts - became utterly overwhelming and “not worth it”. Now, if you have followed FLDR for any amount of time - you know that our team feels very strongly that the pups are ALWAYS “worth it” - so our focus has never wavered from doing right by them and giving them absolutely everything they need. Would it be “easier” to just say “Not my dumpster, not my fire”, place the pups we have and walk away from rescue? Perhaps.
Unfortunately, there are still way too many pups in need of help and we are just not the type of people who can just forget about them and fade away because that is what is easy. Trust me, there are many conversations that have been had amongst us about how we wish we were built that way and we could - because wow, life would be so much easier, right? But each day we get up and we know there are pups whose lives literally depend on us being strong enough to carry the emotional baggage for them - so they can thrive and have the best lives possible, especially when they often have not been afforded that previously. There are multiple pups that have come into our care that have a multitude of medical needs and honestly, we have needed to fundraise for them, but the crippling anxiety about having to post asking for donations and the inevitable gripes, comments and nitpicking that comes with that has been way too much and every time I get close to trying to get a post up, the panic just kicks in about who can watch the comments and moderate in real-time and then feeling horribly guilty about even having to have one of our team “babysit” the socials when there is so much else to be done…so I just roll it over to the next day’s “to do” list and the cycle then repeats. It’s honestly taken me three days just to get this post composed. But here is the honest truth and the reality that we are facing in today’s world - the trolls/critics/bullies aren’t going away - they are just becoming more emboldened each and every day. The amount of pups that need rescue isn’t decreasing - it’s sadly increasing, while the number or rescues/rescuers willing/able to bear the emotional toll is decreasing. So what do we do? We pivot a little and carry on as best we can - we will be resuming our postings and fundraising efforts - because if we don’t, pups will suffer. We will be instituting a one-strike and you are banned policy. Previously, we have tried to give people the benefit of the doubt and respond to the negative comments with positivity, only blocking/deleting/banning if things got out of hand. The personal threats and attacks against our team have changed our willingness to do that. We will quash things before there is any chance or ability to escalate the best we can. We understand that not everyone will agree with the pups we save, the care plans our team and vets develop for them - and that is ok. Give it a “hmph” and keep on scrolling. In the coming days we will begin introducing you to some of our pups, like Peaches, that have had some medical challenges and could use helping paws, but ahead of that we just wanted to go ahead and explain how we plan to move forward on socials. We deeply appreciate all of you who have been so supportive of us and our pups, all 5,516 (and counting!) of them, whether you are new here or are a long-time fan/supporter, thank you for being a part of our “pack”. We thank you in advance for your kindness and understanding. -Laurie
