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Mikayla Raines, Who Rescued Foxes and Other Animals, Is Dead at 30

U.S.|Mikayla Raines, Who Rescued Foxes and Other Animals, Is Dead at 30

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/us/mikayla-raines-dead.html

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She founded Save a Fox Rescue to care for foxes that had been abandoned or bred for their pelts on fur farms. She gained millions of social media followers along the way.

Mikayla Raines, a young woman with long red hair, holds a gray fox in her arms and smiles, standing in front of a wall painted with a giant fox mural.

June 28, 2025Updated 5:51 p.m. ET

Mikayla Raines, who accumulated millions of followers on social media for her work in rescuing and championing foxes and other animals, died on June 20 at her home in Faribault, Minn. She was 30.

Her husband, Ethan Frankcamp, said the cause of death was suicide. He said Ms. Mikayla had struggled with mental health issues and had experienced some bullying on social media.

Ms. Raines grew up under the wing of her mother, who worked in wildlife rehabilitation. She founded Save a Fox Rescue, a nonprofit sanctuary dedicated to rescuing foxes born in captivity, in 2017. Her work had become so popular that she had 2.4 million followers on YouTube.

She rehabbed foxes and found them adoptive homes. Many were from so-called fur farms, where animals are bred for their pelts and live in tiny wire cages, unable to move about freely or sometimes even to sit up.

Other foxes she rescued were surrendered by owners who found it difficult to care for them. Still others were seized by authorities after having been kept illegally.

Ms. Raines’s organization rescued some 150 foxes from “certain death,” she wrote in an undated post on the Save a Fox website.