People sometimes ask how I ended up running a kitten rescue. The short answer is that I kept finding kittens. The longer answer is that rescue scratches the same part of my brain that has shaped almost everything else I do: I see a problem, I want to understand why it keeps happening, and eventually I find myself building a system to do something about it.
I didn't set out to start a rescue organization. Like a lot of people involved in rescue, I started by helping the animal in front of me, and then another one, and then another. Eventually there were kittens who needed foster homes, cats who needed to be trapped and fixed, people asking for help, veterinary appointments to coordinate, and an ever-growing amount of information I needed to learn.
At some point, helping individual cats became something bigger.
It started with learning how to help.
The more involved I became in rescue, the more I realized how much I didn't know. I learned how to care for neonatal kittens and recognize when something was going wrong. I learned about parasites, quarantine, vaccination schedules and the thousand small things that can affect whether a fragile kitten thrives. I learned how TNR works, how community cat colonies function, how to find affordable veterinary care, how to screen adopters, and how much cooperation it takes between independent rescuers, fosters, clinics, shelters and ordinary people in the community to keep this work moving.
Most importantly, I started to understand how much of rescue happens long before an animal ever appears on an adoption website.
The cute kitten looking for a home is the part everyone sees. What you don't see is everything that had to happen to get that kitten there, or the larger problem that kitten represents.
Kittens are the visible part of a much bigger problem.
Kittens are easy to care about. They're tiny, ridiculous, frequently convinced they are much more capable than they actually are, and extremely good at getting people's attention.
But a litter of kittens is also evidence of something larger. Somewhere there is usually an unaltered mother cat. There may be an entire community colony nearby. Someone may have been feeding cats without access to affordable spay and neuter services. A friendly cat may have been abandoned outside. A family may have been unable to afford veterinary care or simply may not have known what resources were available.
Once I understood that, it became impossible for me to think about rescue as simply taking kittens inside, raising them and finding them homes. Saving the kittens in front of us matters, but preventing the next litter matters too.
That's why the work expanded beyond fostering and adoption. Rescue also means TNR, community education, helping people find resources, supporting colony caregivers, improving access to veterinary care where we can, and working with other organizations and independent rescuers. There are far too many cats who need help for any one person or organization to solve the problem alone.
So why specialize in kittens?
Kittens, especially very young ones, occupy a strange gap in animal welfare. They are physically tiny, but the amount of care they require can be enormous.
A neonatal kitten may need to be fed around the clock. Young kittens can decline frighteningly quickly when they become sick. A single litter can mean weeks of feeding, cleaning, weighing, medicating, socializing and monitoring before they are even old enough for their vaccines and spay or neuter surgeries, much less ready for adoption.
That kind of care can be difficult to provide in a traditional shelter environment, but it works remarkably well in foster homes. A spare bathroom, bedroom or playpen can become a nursery. A foster who sees those kittens every day learns their normal behavior and is much more likely to notice subtle changes. The kittens also get to grow up surrounded by the ordinary sights, sounds, people and animals of a home rather than spending those formative weeks in a kennel.
Then, when everything goes right, something that arrived weighing a few ounces eventually walks out the door with a family of its own.
I don't think that part will ever get old.
Rescue is also a lot less cuddly than it looks from the outside.
There is plenty of kitten cuddling. I'm certainly not going to pretend that's an unfortunate side effect of the job.
There is also an astonishing amount of laundry.
Behind the adorable adoption photos are medication schedules, veterinary appointments, adoption applications, supply orders, fundraising, social media, recordkeeping, quarantine protocols, cleaning, early-morning feedings and conversations about poop that become far more detailed than anyone outside animal rescue would consider reasonable.
There are harder parts too. Sometimes you do everything right and still lose one. Sometimes there are more animals who need help than there are foster homes or money to help them. Sometimes the responsible answer is no even when you desperately want it to be yes. Sometimes helping an animal means helping the person who found them rather than bringing that animal into the rescue.
And sometimes the most important thing you can do for kittens is make sure they are never born in the first place.
That last part is why I care so much about spay/neuter access and TNR. Adoption saves the cats who are already here. Prevention changes how many will need saving tomorrow.
Eventually, helping became an organization.
Tabby's Tiny Tabbies grew out of that work. What started as me helping cats became a Houston-based nonprofit rescue focused especially on neonatal and at-risk kittens, providing foster care, medical support and adoption services while also working to give people better information about kitten care, TNR and responsible pet ownership.
Being foster-based is an important part of how I want the rescue to work. I don't want to recreate a tiny animal shelter inside somebody's house. I want kittens growing up in homes, learning that vacuum cleaners are obnoxious, couches are excellent, humans can be trusted, and dinner is apparently several minutes late every single day.
I want them to be healthy and confident by the time they're ready for adoption, and then I want to find people who will love them for the next fifteen or twenty years.
That's the happy-ending part of rescue, but it isn't the ultimate goal.
The real goal is fewer kittens who need rescuing.
This surprises people sometimes. I run a kitten rescue, but success isn't an endless supply of kittens for us to save.
Success is fewer neonatal kittens arriving cold and hungry because their mother disappeared. It's fewer accidental litters and fewer friendly cats abandoned outside before anyone realizes they're pregnant. It's community cats being sterilized and returned to stable, managed colonies instead of producing another generation of kittens. It's someone finding a litter outside and knowing when to intervene and when to wait for mom. It's a pet owner knowing where to find affordable veterinary care before surrendering their animal becomes their only option.
Success is also watching a kitten I once worried might not survive sprint across somebody else's living room as though they have always belonged there. Rescue has to deal with the immediate problem and the systemic one at the same time. We help the animal who needs us today while trying to create a community in which fewer animals will need that intervention tomorrow.
So, why kittens?
Because they're vulnerable, but also because what happens to them is connected to a much larger system. Once I started understanding that system, I couldn't really stop at helping the kitten in front of me.
There are practical things we can do that make a measurable difference. We can keep fragile kittens alive. We can support the people willing to foster them. We can get cats sterilized before another litter is born. We can help people understand what to do when they find kittens outside. We can connect people with resources they didn't know existed. We can build better processes for getting animals from vulnerable situations into safe homes.
Somewhere along the way, what began as helping individual cats became another version of the work I've apparently been drawn to all along: understand the problem, figure out how the pieces fit together, and build something that helps.
I build things, I grow things, and I help things thrive. Sometimes, those things have whiskers.