Nicole Flanagin remembers exactly the moment an influencer came after her business. It was the early hours of a March morning and the cat cafe owner in Lenoir, North Carolina, got a message. “At 1.37,” she says, “a friend sent me the link to this girl’s TikTok.”

The 41-year-old was already having a bad 24 hours. A mother of four, Flanagin also works at a pet rescue shelter and had spent the previous day unsuccessfully fighting for a dog not to be put down. She got home exhausted and promptly conked out in bed. Then she woke up to the message.

The video began innocuously enough with a local influencer sitting in her parked car. “For those of you who know me,” she stated, “I do reviews of local businesses. One very special thing about me is I don’t make bad reviews – but I’m kinda mad right now!” The woman had just taken her child to an unnamed cafe with “animals you can pet”, only to be coldly turned away because she had got its visiting hours wrong. In the influencer’s telling, she began bargaining with staff to try to let the girl into the area where the animals were kept. No dice. Her daughter started “literally bawling her eyes out … and they were just, like, standing there staring”.

Flanagin knew instantly that the woman was talking about her cafe, Brews and Mews – the only animal cafe in the area. The cats are fosters from local shelters, and children aged six and under can only visit during “Happy Meow-ers” sessions, to safeguard the cats’ time away from customers – particularly small, sticky‑fingered ones.