This ‘Kitten’ Had No Fur and Barely Moved — But It Turned Out to Be Something Much Rarer (2 of 3)

“It looked like something out of a science fiction film,” Melissa said. “Hairless. Wrinkled. Eyes too big for its face. You’d think it was a kitten at first glance, but the proportions were… off.”

The creature weighed barely a pound, its skin mottled with dirt, its paws raw. When Melissa reached out with a gloved hand, it didn’t hiss or flee. It just blinked—slowly. Almost knowingly.

They rushed it back to the rescue center, where a vet tech took one look and muttered, “That’s not a cat.”

Bloodwork and x-rays confirmed it.

It wasn’t feline at all.

It was a newborn fox—specifically, a red fox kit born with a rare congenital disorder that left it almost completely hairless. The odds of survival in the wild? Practically zero.

“Without fur, she couldn’t regulate her body temperature or camouflage herself. She wouldn’t have made it through the week,” Dr. Shelby Graves, the attending wildlife vet, explained. “The fact that she was still alive is nothing short of a miracle.”

They named her Fern.

For days, the staff worked around the clock, feeding her a special diet through a syringe, swaddling her in heated blankets, applying ointments to her cracked skin. And through it all, Fern never cried, never lashed out.

“She was oddly calm. It’s like she knew she was being saved,” Melissa said.

As news of Fern’s rescue spread, offers for adoption flooded in. But the team had other plans. She wouldn’t be a pet—Fern deserved to be wild.