After founder’s shocking suicide, a Minnesota fox rescue carries on its mission—despite criticism
May 2026
By OLIVIA HINES
When she was a little girl, Mikayla Raines’ extraordinary bond with animals stood out to her family.
“It was far beyond the norm,” her mother, Sandi Raines, recalls.
Neighbors in Mikayla’s hometown of Lakeville, Minnesota, nicknamed her “MikDoolittle” for her constant rehabilitation of injured or orphaned animals—bunnies, squirrels, any creature she could help, Sandi says.
“She was so attuned to the animals that if they were in pain, she felt it,” Mikayla’s husband, Ethan Frankamp, says.
Mikayla Raines, age 5, feeds several deer at a family member’s home in Minnesota in the late 1990s.
One moment in particular captured Mikayla’s essence, her mother says.
Her mother says Mikayla found a baby fox—also called a kit—soaked and shivering, after it became trapped in a sprinkler system. She brought him home, potty-trained him, nursed him back to health, and raised him until he was strong enough to be released back into the wild.
“She didn’t want to do it,” Sandi says, referring to the release.
The family lived near a wildlife reserve, where Mikayla finally let the fox go.
Sandi Raines with her daughter Mikayla in 1995.
Mikayla Raines, age 10, cuddling Rocky, a young racoon she rescued. “She was already called MikDoolittle around town,” her mother Sandi says, referring to the fictional character Dr. Doolittle. “Everyone knew where to bring orphaned or injured animals.”
“He came back after an hour,” Sandi says.
That deep connection to animals would go on to define Mikayla’s life—and her legacy.
In 2018, Mikayla founded her nonprofit rescue, SaveAFox, which is now located in Faribault, Minnesota. She built a following of more than 2.5 million subscribers on YouTube, where she shared rescue updates and daily life at the sanctuary.
But in early 2025, the online attention Mikayla received escalated into cyberbullying from people who criticized her methods.
“People had been throwing dirt on Mikayla’s name and the rescue,” Ethan says. “She put the animals’ well-being over her own time and time again.”
Months later, the harassment, coupled with Mikayla’s long-term mental health struggles, led her to commit suicide at age 30.
“The grief overwhelms me,” Sandi says. “At first I couldn’t sleep at all and now all I want to do is sleep and never leave the house.”
Today, Mikayla’s family–though still coping with the tragic loss—is determined to continue her mission “to rescue and provide forever homes for captive-born, non-releasable wildlife.”
“God looked down and said, ‘I’m sending you this child, and she’s going to make a huge impact, but you can only have her for 30 years,’” Sandi says.
From a fur farm to a rescue
One day while driving through Iowa at the age of 18, Mikayla stopped at what’s known as a “fur farm,” a farm where foxes are kept and bred in captivity for their fur. She wasn’t familiar with these farms but heard they had foxes, according to Sandi.
Mikayla noticed three dehydrated kits on the verge of death, Sandi says. The owner of the farm told Mikayla that when the mother foxes are sick or stressed they can’t feed the fox kits, and the babies are “put out of their misery,” or killed on the farm “by being struck over the head with a hammer.”
“She said, ‘Oh my gosh, no! Can I take them with me?’” Sandi says.
Mikayla, upset, left that day with the three sick kits that were scheduled to be killed. She then built a partnership with the farmer, who would contact her when a fox was orphaned or dying.
“She would jump in her van and pick up the fox,” Sandi says.
While raising the kits, Mikayla decided she should start a wildlife rescue.
“She was already starting to get people to donate to help her with the few foxes that she had,” Sandi says. “That’s when we started SaveAFox, and that’s how it began.” The United States Department of Agriculture licensed Mikayla to exhibit and sell foxes in 2019.
Mikayla rehabilitated foxes born in captivity with deformities or illnesses, which she believed made them unappealing to fur farms that would ultimately kill them.
During the early years of her rescue, officials attempted to shut down SaveAFox after learning that Mikayla had taken in more foxes than her permit allowed. Because she had so many social media followers at that point, the case drew the attention of national media outlets who came to cover the story. Thousands of Mikayla’s supporters had contacted officials in protest.
Eventually, Mikayla was allowed to keep her permit, in part due to the public pressure.
“We had to go and fight the city, the township, and the state to get permits to be able to do what she wanted to do there,” Sandi says.
Between 2018 and 2025, Ethan says Mikayla rescued thousands of foxes from fur farms and other abusive or neglectful situations, and found new homes for around 800 of them–as pets. In 2024 alone, SaveAFox rescued 374 red foxes, as well as one domestic cat, one lamb, one black bear and one pine marten, according to its tax filings.
SaveAFox took in $947,000 in revenue in 2024 and more than half of that came from donations. A quarter came from merchandise sales, and about 10% from program services, like tours and events, and other revenue streams.
Dixie (foreground) and Linus, both red foxes, in their play yard at SaveAFox. There are ten yards for the animals on the property in Faribault, Minnesota.
Despite being a red fox, SaveAFox says Kipper’s grey coloring is a direct result of captivity in fox fur farms. His yard mate behind him, Mala, is also a red fox.
Mikayla Raines, her husband Ethan Frankamp, and their daughter Freya in 2021.
The rescue spent $1.28 million in 2024 with the biggest expenses being land, buildings and equipment. The rescue’s total net worth was $1.3 million.
Mikayla and Ethan met when he volunteered at SaveAFox. They married at the rescue in 2020, and their daughter, Freya, arrived a year later.
In 2020, Mikayla expanded the rescue with a second location in Florida called SaveAFox South. She raised $30,000 in donations for the initiative.
Foxes as pets? Not recommended by most
Despite operating two locations, SaveAFox doesn’t have the ability to keep every fox it rescues. To work around this issue, the organization puts up foxes for adoption.
“Unfortunately [we] can’t keep every rescue we take in due to limitations with space and staffing and expenses,” Ethan says. “We always want to be responsible with the number of animals we have here, and maintain adequate space and socialization for all of them.”
SaveAFox only adopts out the friendly and less wild foxes, according to its website. Applicants must fill out a form and undergo a background check to be considered for adoptions, but approval isn’t guaranteed.
Most states don’t allow people to own foxes as pets. Those that do require a license or permit, like Minnesota.
“Foxes are a 10- to 15-year, loud, stinky and destructive commitment,” says Reanna Morgan, the founder of Clevyr Creatures, a fox sanctuary in Oklahoma. When people ask her about adopting foxes, she’s blunt when telling them what they can expect.
“Everyone sees a cute baby fox, or a beautiful adult fox, and thinks to themselves they would love to have a pet fox, too,” Morgan says. “There are a million-and-one reasons why a fox may not be a good fit for most homes.”
Chad Thesing, an environmental and animal supervisor at the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, says foxes don’t make good pets because they’re “inherently still a wild animal. Why wouldn’t you just get a dog?” Thesing asks. He says dogs, cats and domesticated livestock have been bred over hundreds of years to be likeable and mild mannered.
“They’re unpredictable,” Thesing says about foxes. “I would suspect people that get foxes as pets, it’s great while they’re young, then as they get older they start scratching everything, going into heat. By year one they are more wild.”
Morgan says, “they bite and nibble and chew all the time. Even when happy they are usually biting on you.”
On the other hand, according to the Institute for Environmental Research and Education, fox attacks are rare. Roughly 4.5 million people in the United States are bitten by dogs every year, whereas there are less than 10 incidents of fox bites annually.
Foxes are loud and make over 20 different vocalizations, Morgan says. “Most of which could be described as screaming.”
They’re also extremely destructive. Since they dig dens, “they will dig holes in your furniture and walls,” Morgan says.
However, captive bred and born foxes cannot legally be released into the wild, Thesing says, underscoring the importance of fox rescues like SaveAFox.
“They’ve been living in a relatively small cage and they’ve never had to hunt for themselves,” Thesing says. “Very few would last very long.”
In general, keeping a pet fox requires building a secure enclosure with thick fencing and lots of space—at least 100 square feet—for them to run, dig and forage in, according to Morgan. Since foxes are not domesticated animals, an exotic veterinarian is needed for yearly vaccinations, parasite prevention and health checks.
Fawzi, a small fox native to the deserts of North Africa, plays in his den inside the home of Mikayla Raines and her husband, Ethan Frankamp. They adopted him as a pet in 2024.
Foxes also require a strict diet of raw meat, organs, bones and some plants, Morgan says. They can’t be fed cat or dog food from the nearest pet store. “This is a common mistake for fox owners, but cat food has been known to lead to severe kidney issues over time and even total renal failure in foxes,” Morgan says.
With visibility came scrutiny
Mikayla had always received some negative comments online about how she ran her rescue, but over time, it began to worsen.
Ethan remembers days when Mikayla sobbed before putting on her makeup and smiling for a YouTube video.
“It was hard,” he says. “She didn’t want to do it, but she did it for the rescue.”
Some of the people who made comments online accused Mikayla of offering former volunteers cat food instead of money as payment, of telling them not to seek medical care after being bit, of failing to stop foxes from fighting, and of illegal breeding.
Sandi says Mikayla told her that negative comments lingered longer than the positive. “They keep building in my brain,” Sandi says Mikayla told her. “They never go away.”
About a year before her death, the harassment intensified. A small Reddit community that called itself “SaveAFoxSnark” formed to specifically criticize Mikayla and her rescue. Over the course of a year, this page accumulated posts and comments accusing SaveAFox of being “highly unethical” and alleging animal mistreatment, illegal breeding, intimidation of volunteers, and other claims her family says were completely false.
One anonymous post read, “Stop taking in new animals, get your shit figured out. You could do well but your head is too far up your own ass to do so.”
Mikayla fired back, defending herself and the rescue. “Every single instance of a bad happening here results in changes to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” she wrote in a response to one post from March 2025.
Mikayla, Ethan, and Sandi all contacted Reddit, requesting that the posts be removed, saying the allegations were damaging the nonprofit’s reputation. They say they received no response.
The Reporters Inc. reached out to Reddit for comment, but also received no response.
Four months before Mikayla’s death, SaveAFox had received a warning from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) regarding the mishandling of an animal. APHIS administers the Animal Welfare Act (AWA), including establishing minimum standards for humane care and treatment of regulated animals and ensuring compliance.
Ethan says the warning came was about a fox accidentally ingested a foreign object. “The fox was taken in for surgery to have it removed,” Ethan says.
Licensed animal dealers and exhibitors undergo regular inspections that determine if a facility is in compliance with AWA welfare standards.
“If we find deficiencies, we give the facility a date by which to correct those items,” says Andre Belle, a spokesman for APHIS. If a facility is unable to correct the action then the USDA will revoke its licensing, or order it to stop operations.
Her final days
Sandi believes the “last straw” for Mikayla came when she discovered that one of the people harassing her online was someone who had previously mentored her in animal rescue.
“She just couldn’t deal with that,” Sandi says.
Mikayla had struggled with her mental health for most of her life. She experienced what’s known as “sensory sensitivities” and difficulty with socialization from a young age. She was placed in special education, and was later diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder.
“She had Alice in Wonderland syndrome,” Ethan says. “She would touch a smooth surface, and it would feel like sandpaper to her.”
Mikayla Raines with her pet fox, Finnegan, at the SaveAFox rescue. Another fox awaits a similar hug.
Sandi says Mikayla had been in and out of mental health facilities for years.
“She went through a lot. She’s had medications on and off, all different kinds of medications, half of which actually made her worse.” Sandi says. “I saw her starting to deteriorate.”
The night before her death, Mikayla talked with her mother about the bullying. “Mom, you’re right,” she said. “I need to go [back] into inpatient care now.”
Sandi was on the phone with an intake coordinator the next morning when she received a call from Ethan telling her Mikayla had died.
“No matter how many times people tell me not to feel guilty,” Sandi says, “I feel like if I could have just been an hour earlier, you know, this wouldn’t have happened.”
Three days after her death, Ethan uploaded a YouTube video to the SaveAFox channel sharing the devastating news.
“This is the most hurtful and difficult time of my life,” he says in the video, fighting back tears. “Every single animal here just lost their best friend.”
Mikayla Raines introduces her daughter Freya to Muttias, one of the foxes at the SaveAFox rescue in 2021.
After Mikayla’s death, a petition on Change.org to shut down “SaveAFoxSnark” gathered more than 23,000 signatures.
“This tragedy could have been prevented so easily,” the petition read. “In the year 2025, we should know by now how devastating and cruel cyberbullying is.”
“Trolling is not what Reddit is for. Get rid of the Snark subreddits. They promote bullying and serve no good purpose,” Skyler, a supporter, wrote on the petition’s page.
“Mikayla was an amazing person, she dedicated her life to saving the lives of others,” Nikki, another supporter, wrote. “People who lived sad lives had to snuff out her light for selfish reasons.”
“SaveAFoxSnark” was eventually shut down.
Stephanie Fredrick, an expert in cyberbullying, says suicides like Mikayla’s are rarely caused by a single factor.
“There’s usually a complex picture,” Fredrick says, involving long-term mental health challenges combined with immediate social stressors like online harassment.
Fredrick notes that social media platforms are often slower to respond to reports involving adults than to those involving children, despite the harm being just as serious.
“There’s a significant gap in resources for adults experiencing cyberbullying,” she says. “The support systems that exist in schools simply don’t exist in the adult world.”
Mikayla’s mission lives on
Nearly a year after Mikayla’s death, Sandi now says Mikayla’s 4-year-old daughter Freya believes every butterfly is a sign from her mother.
“I talk to her every day to keep her spirit close,” Sandi says.
Mikayla’s final rescue mission involved saving 500 foxes from one specific fur farm, with whom she’d worked for years. The rescue raised roughly $1 million in donations for the project. The funds supported housing, veterinary care, transportation, staffing and more.
Mikayla had rescued and rehomed 400 foxes at the time of her death. This past January, Ethan was able to reach her goal of 500.
Upon reaching that milestone, Ethan says, “I should’ve felt, you know, relief.” But instead he’s just been “going through the motions.” Grieving Mikayla’s death still consumes him.
Ethan says he’ll continue fulfilling SaveAFox’s mission by adding a small vet clinic to the rescue for future intakes. “I gave Mikayla all of my love and energy, and I will do the same for this rescue moving forward,” Ethan says. “I have to see her goals and dreams be realized.”
Sandi is now advocating for expanding anti-bullying protections for adults, calling for what she refers to as “Mikayla’s Law.” She’s written to Minnesota legislators, Governor Tim Walz, and to the White House.
“It makes no sense that anti-bullying laws stop at childhood,” Sandi says. “Cyberbullying can harm—or kill—people at any age.”
Freya, Ethan, Mikayla and Sandi at DelRay Beach, Florida in January 2019 celebrating Sandi’s 70th birthday.
Ethan wants their daughter to grow up knowing who her mother truly was.
“Mikayla was selfless and relentless and a dreamer. I never want her to think her mother gave up,” he says. “Because that’s not what Mikayla did.”
Mikayla and her daughter Freya at SaveAFox Rescue in 2023.
If you or someone you know is struggling, help is available: The Suicide and Crisis Lifeline can be reached by calling or texting 988.
Olivia Hines can be reached at oliviaannette2@gmail.com
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