A lamb the world had already given up on. Almost.
Kiki was born in November 2021 on a small farm in southeastern Massachusetts. Her mother had been bitten by a mosquito carrying Cache Valley virus while pregnant. The babies of mothers like hers usually don’t make it past birth. Kiki did — but with fused joints, a paralyzed back end, and a mum who wouldn’t nurse her.
She was eleven days old, half-starved, and about to be put down when Deb Devlin — president of a tiny volunteer-run sanctuary called Don’t Forget Us, Pet Us — got the call from board member Meghan King and drove out with a stack of blankets. “I’m not sure she would have survived much longer where she was,” Deb later said.
She didn’t take her to a barn. She took her home. To the kitchen. The living room. The cats. The kids. Kiki has slept indoors ever since — “the cuddliest animal at the sanctuary,” in Deb’s words.
Most of Kiki’s days were spent on a sheepskin while Deb tried not to lose her mind over physical therapy that didn’t seem to be working. But Kiki kept doing this odd thing — she’d press the right side of her head into the toys with the buttons. The little baby toys with lights and music.
She wasn’t fumbling. She was aiming. Pressing the same spot over and over to make the sound come back. Deb watched her do it for weeks and one day thought: “if she can hit that button, she can hit a joystick.”
About $1,500 in donations, one used motorized chair from Mobility Equipment Recyclers of New England, a stroller body, a roll of zip-ties, and a repositioned joystick later — Kiki had a wheelchair. Deb gave it to her on July 1 to kick off Disability Pride Month.
“It took seconds for her to start driving it.”
She baas at the horses as she passes them. She has a best friend, a goat named Kashu, who follows her around the yard like a tiny shadow. She visits classrooms as an ambassador. She has seasonal outfits. She has, at last count, the soft heart of every internet stranger who has ever clicked her video.
“When she’s in that chair, she has the freedom to go where she wants to go. She’ll motor out to whatever spot she wants to be in and then she just puts her head up and she just basks in the sun.” — Deb
$KIKI exists for one reason: to make sure Kiki and the fifty-or-so other rescues at Faunce Corner Road keep waking up to grain in the bowl and people who refused to give up on them.
