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Kitten Lady Wants Your Help Saving All the Animals
Hannah Shaw has a million devoted Instagram followers and a new book that helps kids develop their natural compassion for animals
Hannah Shaw, also known as “Kitten Lady,” is famous among her million Instagram followers for rescuing kittens — she’s saved hundreds, many of them only days old, and shares their journeys online. But IRL, she’s an equal-opportunity animal-lover, and always has been. “I have always been an animal advocate,” she tells me on a call from San Diego, where she runs Orphan Kitten Club, a nonprofit kitten rescue launched last year. “I was involved in animal advocacy for farmed animals, animals in laboratories, and animals in entertainment for much longer than I was ever involved in anything with cats.”
Shaw, who grew up in New York City, went vegetarian at age 12 after watching a disturbing video about factory farming — at summer camp, of all places. “I went home from camp and said, ‘I’m never eating animals again,’” she recalls. “My mom said, ‘We’ll see how long that lasts,’ and that was 20 years ago.”
Shaw believed then that abstaining from meat was “the best possible thing you could do to help animals.” But a few years later she learned about veganism — specifically, the cruelties of the egg and dairy industries — and says she was “mortified” into going vegan then and there. “I lived off pasta with tomato sauce and bagels with peanut butter for most of my teenage years,” she laughs.
Around the same time, Shaw began frequenting animal rights protests, and when she got to college at 17, she remembers the Ringling Bros. Circus coming to campus every year. “I hated the circus,” she says, “So I started organizing protests and doing undercover documentation. I spent a lot of my college free time taking meetings with the school, trying to get them to stop supporting Ringling.”
But about 10 years ago, Shaw’s focus shifted dramatically when she spotted a tiny, crying kitten stuck in a tree in Philadelphia, where she lived at the time. The creature was sick, orphaned, and alone — and became her very first kitten rescue, as she documents in her New York Times bestselling book Tiny But Mighty, published in August. After bringing the orphaned…
