How Isabel Klee Turned Rescuing Dogs Into a Thriving TikTok Career

W
hen Isabel Klee was in preschool in South Orange, New Jersey, a semi-concerned teacher called home. Klee was happy and well-behaved, the teacher told Klee’s parents, but she had started to eat all of her food off of the floor. When she moved, she would get from point A to point B by crawling on her hands and knees. She was even drinking water out of bowls on the ground. Whenever there was free time, she would sit in a corner and draw pictures of dogs for as long as she could. 

The remedy, as the teacher saw it, was simple: “You have to get this girl a dog.” 

Klee, 32, says that suggestion changed the course of her life. But even she couldn’t have predicted that this childhood love would evolve into a real career. Klee runs the account @simonsits on TikTok — named for her forever dog, Simon, a foster she fell for — where she shares the stories of rescue dogs to her 1.2 million followers. At face value, Klee’s content is straightforward. She works with the New York rescue organization Muddy Paws to raise awareness about the process of rescuing, fostering, and eventually adopting dogs in need. Shem makes video after video about the fostering process, talking about things like what happens when a dog needs space to heal. She sometimes gently-coaxing them from states of paralyzed fear, other times hilariously bribing them with pieces of cheese to not bark at everything that moves. Since these videos begin the moment Klee is introduced to a rescue, and only end when the dogs finds a home, Klee’s content taps into the parasocial nature of social media by giving her audience plenty of worthy dogs to root for, while maintaining a healthy distance between her online audience and her personal life. But with the release of her debut memoir, Dogs, Boys, and Other Things I’ve Cried About, out April 28, Klee is giving her digital community a never-before-seen look into a story they haven’t heard yet: her own. 

“I started writing about my romantic relationships when I was 18. I’ve always been a hopeless romantic and really worn my heart on my sleeve,” Klee tells Rolling Stone. “I wanted to marry my experiences with people with my experiences with dogs, because they’re more similar than people give them credit for. They’re both about trust and time and the evolution of that relationship. I wanted to take myself as the internet personality out of this, and just be like, ‘Here is me as a person living in New York City and the things that I experienced.’ I’m a real open book.” 

Dogs, Boys, and Other Things isn’t your typical book about an influencer’s journey. Firstly, it has little mention of Klee’s internet presence. Instead, it tells her journey from a reluctant college graduate to a young New Yorker full of career anxiety — mirroring her setbacks and doubts alongside some of her most memorable foster stories. There’s revelations about the transformative relationships that make up her adult memories, from dating a former addict, to meeting the roommates who would become her closest friends, to the chance encounter that led her to her now-fiancé, Jacob Zerhusen. She tells Rolling Stone the choice to keep the social media aspect of her life almost entirely out of the book was intentional. 

“Social media is almost irrelevant to the story. It is the vessel in which I have gotten the platform and people like to listen to my stories,” Klee says. “But it is not as impactful as the work or the rehabilitation that is being done.” 

Klee’s relationship with her childhood dog, Ruby, might have been the first time a dog changed her life. But it took several years after moving out to finally realize that she was missing that canine connection. By then living in New York, Klee began to volunteer part-time at local animal shelters and rescues. While she started her now-famous social media videos as an attempt to demystify fostering for people, she tells Rolling Stone that her work with rescuing dogs actually helped her confront the damaging patterns she found herself in in relationships — and find a better way to give without getting hurt in the process. 

“Fostering is addicting,” Klee says. “In my twenties, I would pour my heart and soul into these relationships and these men. You’re like, ‘Why did I do that? That was so crazy.’ But with dogs, you actually see them change before your eyes. It’s this transformative thing.”

The undeniably biggest — or at least well-known — rescue story under Klee’s belt is the rehabilitation of Tiki the rescue dog. Tiki was rescued alongside his siblings in June of 2025 from a criminal neglect situation. All of the other dogs Tiki was rescued with showed promising signs of healing and growth. Tiki was so shut down that the team was considering euthanization. So Klee took him home. 

“For the first few days, I was like, ‘I made a huge fucking mistake,’” she says. “I was not expecting how bad it was. He would not move. He wouldn’t eat. He would go to the bathroom in his bed and not get up.” 

But Klee documented everything on TikTok, making video after video of Tiki’s slow progress. Every small step was considered a win, from the first time he walked around to the slow emergence of his personality. Tiki’s story was a hit, drawing in over 50 million views and hundreds of thousands of comments. Everyone from loyal Klee followers to famous newcomers — like Kylie Kelce — checked in on Klee’s daily videos to chart Tiki’s growth. After 40 days, Tiki was adopted. But even after he went to his new home, a mantra stuck around online: “Be brave like Tiki.” 

“A lot of people saw themselves in Tiki. A lot of people have experienced trauma and wanted to come out the other side. And watching this story of this little, tiny dog who experienced such horrific things and then actually got better, really hit home,” Klee says. “With Tiki all of these tiny little moments were worth celebrating. And in this day and age of internet culture, where everyone is bragging about everything all the time, to have these tiny, fleeting, singular moments that are so important, was comforting to a lot of people.” 

Klee notes several times that she wants Dogs, Boys and Other Things to be a compelling read for both fans and people who have no context for her online presence. But for those who do follow her online, this will be the first time Klee’s audience has such intimate details about her life, emotions, and personal story. It’s a big change for the creator who’s practically eaten, breathed, and lived dog rescue online for the past five years — one she’s not necessarily against. 

“My internet content is very honest and open. Maybe I’m not talking about my interpersonal relationships quite as much, but it’s that same premise of sharing the good and the bad and the hard,” Klee  says. “I love to talk about the gray areas of life. So maybe I will start sharing more of that now that the book is out. Because people might be like, ‘Well, we know about your heroin addicted ex-boyfriend, so we can talk about that some more?’ Who knows? Maybe it’s a new era.”