A mother and daughter are using TikTok to fund their own cat rescue in Powys.

Karen Smy and her daughter Lauren created Karen’s Cat Community to help their effort to rescue cats in the area. They began the account in lockdown after playing around with the app.

“It all came from TikTok because Ben, my son, he used to do TikToks – I used to take the mickey out of him – it was the ones where you stand at the top of the stairs and went down on a tray and all that,” said Karen.

“So I started doing TikToks with him and being silly and then I posted a couple of videos with the cats.”

County Times: Lauren and Karen Smy

From there, the channel exploded creating a set of viral clips which lead to them gaining over 200,000 subscribers. This has led to donations coming in from America to help them with their rehoming programme.

Over that time, they have managed to find homes for over 100 cats in the area and they are expanding their operations, opening shop called the Cwtch Cath in Llandrindod Wells. They also plan to open the county’s first cat bed and breakfast where guests will be able to visit the sanctuary overnight.

The aim is to make the rescue sustainable and allow them to be able to devote more time to rescuing and rehoming cats in the area.

Working out these plans has not slowed their work at all, with the mother and daughter team rescuing a mother cat and sox kittens at the beginning of last week before rescuing a further five kittens and a mother abandoned in a garden.

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Both Lauren and Karen are urging members of the public to seek help if they are struggling with cats.

“For anyone who is struggling to neuter their cats there are schemes out there to help so you don’t need to keep breeding your cats because they do get a lot of health issues.” said Lauren.

“There are people who can help, and if you don’t want cats on your land you don’t need to hurt them. There are schemes by Cats’ Protection for people on low income – you can get your cats neutered for a reasonable price. Powys Pets in Need also help with food.”

According to Karen some in the area are killing cats rather than seeking out rescues.

“Cats and kittens are often looked at as vermin, whereas a dog is cute and it’s a pet," she said.

County Times: Karen out rescuing cats

“Cats are looked at as no different from a rat or a squirrel. What we hear a lot of is “it’s just a cat”. You have middle of the road farmers who will ask for help and will provide food and a warm place to stay and a cat can live like that for years and with feral cats that’s not a problem.

“But then we’ve got other ones who we’ve heard are drowning them in buckets. Two ladies who came into the shop recently have kittens that they had found that had been thrown in the river. Why?”

Lauren added: “People are still hurting cats and killing them when there is absolutely no need for it. Even if your local rescue is full, if Cats’ Protection won’t help you, if corporations won’t help you- there are smaller rescues. If they can’t help, there are smaller rescues that can help. There is absolutely no need to go round and doing that to cats.”