Never Play with A Soul

Mikayla Raines of SaveAFox has taken her life. I became in love with her personality, her videos, Finnegan Fox’s “He he he”, a certain coyote, who found a special place in my heart, and the stories around building, maintaining and funding SaveAFox quite a while ago. 
 
Who was she? A child gifted to this world. A mother. A wife. A soul facing her own challenges while walking her path with an open heart. A rescuer, gentle to animals, giving her all. Someone who had built up a rescue working together with others.

​Her husband Ethan states that some of the bullying, she had had to endure, came from other rescuers, people who are saving animals but choose to bully and thus consciously hurt another human being. It is a strange world, we live in.
 
Bullying someone else, belittling them, putting them down behind their back, causing them physical, emotional or psychological pain, abusing spirituality, religion or the illusion of being anonymous on social media by creating an avatar or fake persona, mocking their struggles, knowingly re-traumatizing and abandoning them, when they cannot bear it anymore and ask for help and then smearing and isolating them, is neither “just a joke”, “just a mistake” or “a prank”. It is playing with the soul of another being.

"White Fox Stargazing", white pastels, Kristin Raphaela Otti (2025, Hotel Hecher, Wolfsberg, Carinthia)

"The Trickster", fineliners, Kristin Raphaela Otti (2005)

People who bully the kind, empathic and loving mistake kindness for weakness. Kind people who do not hit back and who do not retaliate, have gone through pain, they would never wish onto someone else. Kind people are strong as hell, but make no mistake, they have feelings and the abuse takes its toll.
 
Why does the bully choose them? Fear and jealousy, not strength. The bully is unwilling to face themselves or the one who inflicted their own wounding on them originally, another bully or abuser. An abuser confronted gets loud, aggressive, shifts blame or alternatively throws a tantrum like a toddler, deflecting, projecting and provoking, a kind person and empath does not hit back, unless provoked and drained enough by being used as a doormat and emotional garbage can. Then reactive abuse or self-abuse takes place. 
 
Never play with another soul. 
 
Thank you, Mikayla, for your work, saving foxes, minks and coyotes, and for simply being your authentic self.

Kristin Raphaela Otti