A young woman woman who is also a graduate has decided to give up her entire life to the service of rescuing kittens.
Hannah Shaw
Hannah Shaw has dedicated her life and career to rescuing kittens ever since she left university.
According to Oddity Central, the 28-year-old now calls herself a “neonatal kitten warrior” who specialises in fostering abandoned newborn cats that would otherwise end up dead at shelters in Washington D.C. In the past eight years, she’s saved at least ‘a few hundred kittens’ from this terrible fate.
Hannah Shaw and one of her Kittens
Shaw revealed that her passion for animals began at the age of 12, when she decided to quit eating meat. Since then, she’s been involved in several campaigns to protect various species – right from farm animals to big cats in sanctuaries. She started working with kittens, specifically, about eight years ago after she happened to rescue a “teeny tiny kitten” from a tree. She nestled the kitty in her shirt, took her home, named her Coco, and raised her on her own.
The incident compelled Shaw to look more closely at the plight of kittens in her neighborhood. “After rescuing Coco, I started seeing more kittens outside,” she said. “I also started getting calls from people saying they’d found a kitten and were asking me for help. It became a very fast, cumulative thing where I began learning more about kittens while also honing my kitten eyes, so like anytime I was outside and there was a kitten within a thousand feet of me, I’d hone in on her.”
Shaw revealed that rescuing kittens was a challenge in her early twenties, when she used to work in the public school system. “I would literally sneak tiny kittens to work in my shirt, and feed them in the bathroom so no one would notice!” But now that she’s working exclusively in the “animal nonprofit world,” she doesn’t have such a hard time bringing kittens into her office.
Apart from her rescue missions, Shaw spends her time raising awareness about the problems that kittens face in shelters. “Almost all orphaned neonatal kittens are found outdoors, born from unsterilized, free-roaming cats,” she explained. “Most of the time when people find orphaned kittens outside, they bring them to the shelter, where they are immediately killed.”
“A lot of people are surprised that kittens are at such an at-risk population,” she added. “Shelters often don’t have the resources to put towards kittens and especially neonatal kittens, because they require round-the-clock care. Most shelters around the United States look at them as an untreatable condition and they’re euthanized almost immediately.”