Raines created a successful YouTube channel dedicated to her advocacy efforts rescuing foxes from fur farms.
Animal rescue activist and YouTube star Mikayla Raines has died by suicide, according to her husband. She was 29.
Ethan Raines announced her death in an emotional video he posted to her YouTube channel on Monday.
He said that for years his wife suffered from various mental health issues and struggled to cope with online criticism.
“She couldn’t bear what she was feeling any longer, and she ended her life,” he said. “And it breaks my heart that someone who is selfless and devoted her life to animals could have so much negativity pointed at her.”
It’s not the most gorgeous of truths, but if it wasn’t online abuse, it would likely be something else for her. 75% of people diagnosed with bpd will make at least one suicide attempt in their lifetime.
You’re not necessarily wrong. I certainly don’t have any information to refute what you say…
I’m just not sure that pointing this out on a post about a woman’s death is enhancing the discussion at all, so I’m not sure why you felt the need to share…
Gee, do you think someone with BPD would be more or less likely to die by suicide if they’re facing an online harassment campaign. 🙄
More. As I said, the diagnosis is horrible and unfortunately this is not an unlikely occurrence. Seems people hate that as expected. But I know I would be happy to know this statistic earlier in life, so I am not ashamed to express it.
It’s pretty disgusting to look at someone who died by suicide after facing a harassment campaign and then suggest “maybe it wasn’t the harassment, maybe it was the BPD.”
Unfortunately, it’s just the truth. It’s a strong predictor for death before age 25. Bless you, hope you can learn again and help people in need
You’re a fucking joke.
Sadly, you are mistaken and lost in rage. I hope you recover soon it seems very painful
Don’t take the high road when you just said “maybe it wasn’t the online harassment campaign that led to her suicide, but her BPD.” 🙄
Holy fuck, I loved SaveAFox, what the hell is wrong with people 😭🤮
I don’t understand why anyone would be mad that someone was saving foxes from becoming pelts.
Unless you’re the piece of shit profiting from the suffering and death of those animals, in which case, your opinion is null and void, nobody should be against the idea IMO.
It’s incredible to me that anyone would carry such vitriol against such a noble cause.
May she rest in peace.
On any online forum, there are people who just like to stir the shit: doxxing, swatting, death threats, you name it. Most platforms have reduced their efforts to keep those slimebags at bay, and this is the result.
It is a sad state of affairs when a person is doing something actually good to help animals and they get harassed. May her legacy live on forever.
Meat eaters can’t stand animal rights activists
🤡🤡
so you think vegans were attacking her? seems like you’re an idiot
My wife told me about this last night, supposedly the majority of the abuse came from OTHER FUCKONG RESCUERS!!!
From what i’ve seen of the dog rescue world, this seems right.
Also the shit the tiger king put Carol Baskin through. At least he is in jail.
That seems so crazy to me. I’m on a bunch of different guitar forums around the Internet, and I don’t recall a single time when I’ve seen anyone attack or harass a content creator or anyone else. It’s a really friendly, highly supportive, international community, and it’s HUGE. Everybody feels like a friend.
It happens in photography, I think there’s a competitive element.
The guitar world is pretty competitive, too. Perhaps the difference is the guitar is exceedingly difficult to learn, and we’ve ALL struggled with it, and have had help from others overcoming our problems. So we can all sympathize with each other, and want to share our help and knowledge.
Must have been jealous of her.
These guys probably saw the Tiger King documentary and decided to armchair warrior to virtue signal how much more pro-animal rights their non-involvement and passivity was than her.
Be online and you will get harassed, it is the way.
I’ve never been harassed, probably only because of my gender identity.
I agree and I hope we all remember that mindset the next time we read about activists blocking a slaughterhouse.
Sad, I watched her shorts sometimes. Apparently there was a hate ‘snark’ subreddit that just made up shit about her all day, with some members connected to the factory farming fur industry
So…wait. I’ve never heard of her, but you’re saying there was an entire subreddit deddicated to making up lies about her, saying she did horrible shit, KNOWING what they said was a lie? Because if I’m reading this right, that’s pretty fucked up.
I follow her and she was a beautiful human. This news is so painful for me.
Apparently there are ‘snark’ (what the hell kinda name for a genre is that?) pages on Reddit for all sorts of niche stuff
So telling lies about people is a ok, but mentioning a green plumber is not. I’m fucking grateful that I’m banned from that cesshole of a website now.
It’s a pretty fucked up name if you ask me, specifically.
There’s snark pages on lemmy too, some of them moved here after getting kicked off Reddit.
Man, my life is kinda sad, but at least it’s not “join a community specifically to hate on stuff” sad. What hosers.
quietly unsubscribes from all reddit sublemmies
Lol at Snarky Puppy getting caught up in that search result.
TIL there’s a snarky puppy community here
Fundiesnark is often for people who leave insane religious institutions or crazy churches to talk about that and make fun of the people still trying to push their hateful religious agenda online, there’s a lot of survivors of some bad shit there, I support it frankly but like, foxes? Not like any of these people are coming from fur farms where they were personally abused and need a space to talk about its ridiculousness
Also snarky puppy is just a musical group it’s not a snark group
Snarky puppy is amazing!
Not like any of these people are coming from fur farms where they were personally abused and need a space to talk about its ridiculousness
I suppose they are incredibly small, disturbed people
If there was an organized harassment campaign against her I wonder if there is any legal culpability for those involved.
Wtf she seemed so happy in her vids
Sorry that was a flippant reaction. I’m so sorry she struggled and wish she was able to get help before it came to this.
I have depression and I understand that you can seem outwardly happy and still nothing can bring joy on the inside.
Relevant:
Perhaps someone prone to depression and suicidal ideation might be well advised not to choose a highly visible public career where one is constantly exposed to the rantings of evil trolls.
This isn’t victim-blaming, it’s just an acknowledgement that the world as it currently is, is full of toxic backwaters that should be avoided.
That still sounds like victim blaming to me? Yes, there are a ton of shit people in the world, but I feel like rather than “she shouldn’t have taken up that career”, we should instead be fighting back against the idea that people are allowed to be this shitty:
- What’s up with these people that they give out so much abuse?
- Did YouTube and other sites do anything to protect her?
- What else can we do to protect vulnerable people from abuse while letting them do their job?
- What support did she get? Could she have had more?
- How can we prevent this from happening to the next content creator?
I don’t know the answer to these, but just saying ‘she shouldn’t have started in the first place’ feels like a massive cop out to me.
Depressed people are told to get out and touch grass and do something good for the world, some go and do that and then get attacked and bullied for doing something good in the world. Then someone says well they shouldn’t have done this or not. IMO I would agree its victim blaming. Mental health systems suck in many countries where people rarely get the help they need and then people online bring cruel and inhumane because they can hide behind a screen.
Shut the fuck up, this is absolutely victim blaming. “Maybe she should’ve just wallowed in her depression quietly instead of trying to show others what it’s like to help and advocate for helpless wild animals.”
Why the hell would anyone feel any need to harass someone like this? Shit like this is never justified, but once in a while I can understand their motivations. Not this. RIP, she was pretty cool.
Some nasty people just see someone who appears vulnerable/has mental health issues and use that as an excuse to attack someone. there’s this really fucked up site called Kiwifarms that’s been around for over a decade that was specifically made for trying to harass and bully people to death for being “weird”, trans, or neurodivergent. it could also be they were jealous of her popularity
Because it works.
kiwifarms has been doing this en masse for over a decade and others predated that.
It is gauche to link to it considering this is the umpteenth fucking person murdered by angry and hateful bastards. But Patrick Klepek, someone who has been targeted by these orgs for over a decade, wrote about this in the context of the emulator developer Near being murdered by kiwi farms et al a few years back https://www.vice.com/en/article/what-i-learned-from-near-an-emulation-legend-and-real-person/
He talked about it more on the Waypoint (now Remap) podcast, but it is very much an open secret that these hate campaigns are ongoing with the explicit goal of murdering their target (it is not fucking suicide if you were tormented until you picked up the gun). And how even fellow victims who usually will advocate for this kind of stuff are wary of raising their voices because they or their partner are semi regularly approached, in person, by these bastards.
My hope, as always, is that this will be the last time. That this will lead to focused efforts by those with platforms to speak out. The reality is that the mid tier “creators” will probably say something and give the trite “If you or someone you know is in crisis, please call the national suicide prevention lifeline”. Or, well, these days “the national slip and slide prevention lifeline” because gotta stay fucking monetized. And then they’ll remain silent. All while the biggies choose to stay fucking silent out of concerns of losing people in their audience who are part of those hate campaigns.
So the motivations are… just to kill an innocent person without having to take responsibility for it? You’re right, more needs to be done about this. Look what happened to Chrischan. Probably wasn’t always willing to commit incest.
Why the hell would anyone feel any need to harass someone like this?
For one, there’s good money in it.
Black Cube’s tactics have resulted in a number of international controversies. In Canada, the firm was criticized by an Ontario Court for an attempt that aimed to discredit a judge by trying to get him to make antisemitic comments in secretly recorded meetings. In Romania, two of its employees were convicted of criminal charges involving harassment and hacking. The firm also drew condemnation for covertly surveilling and assisting efforts to discredit women accusing Harvey Weinstein of sexual violence and the investigative journalists researching whether those accusations were credible. Their tactics also involve attempts to goad individuals into making anti-semitic or otherwise damaging remarks.
Why the hell would anyone feel any need to harass someone like this?
Micro-penises.
“Body shaming is good when its men.”
Who’s body shaming? Low self esteem does indeed cause people to lash out at others, and men frequently value their self worth on their dick size.
Accusing anyone that acts a way you don’t like as having a micro penis seems like body shaming to me. I can’t imagine that someone who has one and isn’t a shitty human appreciates being associated with them.
Sophistry. I didn’t accuse “anyone that acts a way I don’t like”, I offered one explanation as to why some people might be assholes to women online.
I don’t like that you’re like weirdly defensive about this, you don’t see me making any accusations.
They are filled with hate, because they are deeply insecure, deeply afraid, and the current political and social climate tells them that this is not only an acceptable way to deal with those feelings, but encourages them to deal with those feelings in this manner.
See, I have no idea what to do with this idea that fits within the bounds of good ethics but I’m certain that there’s something deeply wrong with our species that gets worse the more isolated we can be without dying off. The further back you go the more likely being shunned for being an absolute piece of trash would lead to your death but now the most broken people can still proliferate and cause problems for everyone else without even really needing to leave their homes. I can think of a million better things to do than obssess over and relentlessly bully someone.
I’m glad that we’ve hit a certain point where more and more people are choosing to have higher standards, and maybe that will help, but holy fuck this is gunna take a while to sort out.
I really feel quite torn up over this news. I’d seen the channel and her videos sporadically, she seemed like a kind soul who really loved & cared for the foxes.
RIP Mikayla
I saw a longer quote from him. He doesn’t blame online abuse, rather says that it was a (major?) contributing factor. He also said that some of that abuse was coming from other animal rescues, so I’m sure he’s fucking pissed on top of grieving.
Why the fuck would you harass someone for saving foxes? Is it because she’s a woman?
On the internet, it’s almost always because she’s a woman.
God gave us dominion over all creatures read the Bible!
There are children dying in the streets here, why don’t you do anything about them?
The foxes bread for fur here are not capable of living in the wild, “rescuing” and releasing them is the real animal abuse.
I think fox fur is fancy, fuck you lady!
Just some examples I can think of off the top of my head. People can get pretty polarized when it comes to killing, or not killing animals.
isn’t it stupid?
If you kill cats and dogs, you’re a sociopath. But when you kill foxes, that’s fine.
In this case I’d say it’s a difference between animals raised as a product vs animals as pets. Personally, I don’t take issue with animal products as long as the animal is treated with care during life and dignity during death, but I definitely understand why some people are against animal products. Harassing them to the point of suicide is not an acceptable reaction. I’d also put some money down that the industries she targeted had at least some involvement in harassing her.
What difference does it make what they were “raised for”? Black people were raised for slavery, doesn’t make it right. All food animals have the exact same capability to suffer in the same way that dogs and cats can. So what they were raised for is irrelevant.
h care during life and dignity during death,
they aren’t. Cows have their children taken from them in the dairy industry. male chicks are murdered at 1 DAY OLD in the egg industry. Cows, pigs, chickens etc live in their own festering faeces in the meat indsutries.
A perfect demonstration of my point. Thank you.
I would also like to know what the criticism was, but at the same time, I also feel like the internet can be shit sometimes whether there was reason to criticise or not.
Pretty sad story.
They claimed she was not taking proper care of the foxes. I haven’t read one thing that was in any way proven. It was just trash talking trolls doing what they do best, telling lies. They had story after story about the conditions. The woman was trying to do good, something none of those trolls harassing her have ever did. The trash reddit sub went private because now they fear consequences.
I did the research in the muck mines of the internet for y’all, and it is more complicated than it looks on the surface.
Several animals died in her care due to neglect, including leaving foxes on leashes and letting them get tangled up and baked alive in the sun. There are text messages that leaked of her having paperwork forged to make some animals look like they were bred in captivity. Her organization was registered as a fur farm to avoid some taxes and regulations. Lastly, she had an OnlyFans page where the regularly posed with dogs and foxes in ways that suggested she was trying to appeal to zoofiles, including text descriptions that are very questionable.
A subreddit was created called Save A Fox Snark that was tracking her questionable methods, and one user in particular, seemingly a furry, was very active in screenshotting all of her questionable content in hope that she would get shut down for animal cruelty. That furry is now also being targeted for harassment.
I went straight into the swamp for this info—you can read it all on KiwiFarms, Soyjak, OnlyFans, and the internet archive pages of the Save A Fox Snark subreddit.
Thanks for the context. Very helpful.
Yeah sorry if I don’t believe this when the source is fucking kiwifarms
Kiwifarms isn’t always wrong, but they like to fuck up things major ways, usually by focusing too much on someone being a leftist and/or trans, and sometimes even covering up abusers. They managed to cover up a rapist by not only focusing on her being trans, but also harassed multiple of her victims as it usually were “drunken sex”, which wasn’t considered as rape by many. Also Kiwifarms has an obsession with the “let’s paint our targets as irredeemable assholes, so driving them into suicide will be heroic, and also can be weaponized against the same group later on”. (BPD, while often seem like a misdiagnosis of badly mishandled CPTSD, is pretty much “asshole disorder” in many people’s minds.)
The source isn’t just kiwifarms—the internet archive pages of the subreddit are still up to see exactly what they were posting. The OnlyFans photos have been archived and there are many of them.
Believe whatever you want, but there was a whole mountain of information out there.
There’s a whole mountain of misinformation as well, and you decided that looking into the loaded conclusions and supposed “leaks” that had no other facts to back them up than what they were telling you.
And you need to keep in mind that targeted harassment campaigns are perfectly content twisting and manipulating the truth. I have plenty of experience with shit like that from my personal life. So I do not put a lot of stock in info sourced from places like those
In addition, I highly doubt the founder would have been this deeply affected by the harassment if she actually was a person that didn’t care much for the animals or others and their opinions
I do keep that in mind, that’s why I just report what I saw and where I saw it. The OnlyFans posts were created by her directly, I don’t think there is any dispute that the account was hers.
People can believe what they want, I just did some digging to see what the accusations were that made her feel like suicide was her only option.
She was the subject of harassment for reasons, and here were some of them. Whether the allegations were true or not isn’t the point, she still felt harassed enough to do something terrible.
So basically, you consider going to the people who drove her to commit suicide “doing the research”.
Doing the research to see what they were saying about her that might lead her to commit suicide, yes. If you want to know what the cyber bullying was that caused someone to commit suicide, it makes sense to look at the posts themselves, which is what I did.
I too look at ISIS propaganda when I want to see why they did what they did 🙄
There’s a huge difference between reading Mein Kampf and praising it for its good points.
Where did I praise my sources, exactly?
I did the research in the muck mines of Mein Kampf for y’all, and it is more complicated than it looks on the surface.
<insert Nazi apologism>
I went straight into the swamp for this info—and here’s where you can look it up <insert link to Neonazi sites>
Never, ever source Kiwifarms. That org is fucking disturbing
They were the ones organizing some of the bullying—I wanted to see the posts she was seeing to better understand the nature of the harassment.
If you’re going to put yourself out in the swamp of social media to rally attention for something, you better have the requisite thickness of hide. As sad as the situation is, she made the choice and probably should have backed out before she reached her breaking point. This story has hemophiliac choosing to work at a razor blade factory vibes :o
So a good cause is the same as working in a factory?
Your analogy would have been better to someone providing humanitarian aid in a warzone whilst suffering from a not-immune-to-bombs condition.
(And even in that analogy someone would have to deliberately target her specifically for the work she did, not just a random bombing.)Literally no different than telling women they deserved to be raped cause of what they were wearing. People need to grow the fuck up and stop bullying people, that’s literally the only thing that needs to change here. There’s no reason to bully a person who’s simply working to rescue animals from abusive situations, them being on social media isn’t an excuse to be a garbage person and harass people, to death no less
Yeah I agree it’s a shitty situation, and people should be better. But the thing is a shockingly large portion of those online just aren’t and are not looking to be. At least not right now and probably not for the foreseeable future especially with Orange Julius promoting the sanctity of “free speech”
If you have a fragile psyche and put yourself out there to garner attention on social media in this environment and do not expect some serious trolling to happen, that’s just being naive.
“People should just not bully.” Good luck with that. In the mean time, do what you have to in order to safeguard your mental heath.
The human race makes me really sick on a daily basis these days
It really feels like the human race is determined to destroy itself.
It really does.
How hollow that must feel. Not getting any justice or retribution.
And the disgusting people to blame are probably praising themselves, now.
RIP
The real hollowness is found in the people who have nothing in their lives so they embrace hate and hound those trying to make the world a better place.
From my cursory glance, yes, they are
It’s times like these that I hope there is in fact a god and they are watching folks like that.
If there’s a god, he’s a cunt. Find your own justice.
I agree, but at heart I’m a pollyanna.
“Inside every cynical person is a disappointed idealist.”
- George Carlin
Jesus, it really goes to show how shitty humanity really is.
I actually really liked watching those foxes laughing, it was a nice little bright spot in a world fully of cynicism and bullshit and if course shitty humans had to be shitty humans harassing her for being a decent human being.
Humans not humanity.
I remember watching some fox channels with a lot of rescue foxes including one called Finnegan. Was that her? So sad that anyone would harass somebody like that.
Yes, that was her channel.
NOOOOO :(((( I am heartbroken:(((
poor fennigan and Dixie :(((
Hers was SaveAFox
