Over the years, she has adopted hard-to-home cats - older cats, those with poor temperaments or which others have passed over as being "unattractive". Hands-on experiences with these cats formed the basis of many of the cat care/welfare articles.

She was a cat rescue worker at a local shelter and got plenty of hands-on experience of cat rescue, much of which has been written up to help others. She wrote cat care/welfare articles for magazines around the world and many of these have been updated and expanded for both Messybeast.com and Moggycat . She wrote two leaflets for Cats Protection (League) , one on older cats and the other on euthanasia/pet bereavement and has contributed information or consultancy effort to books about cats.

Cat rescue work provided opportunities to meet and learn from rescuers, owners, behaviourists, vets and breeders and to learn about feral cats and their control. It also meant encountering cases of neglect, cruelty and cat hoarding. She also visited animal shelters/clinics while abroad e.g. KSPCA in Mombasa, Kenya and the Brooke Hospital in Luxor, Egypt, learning more about animal welfare/rescue in different cultures and how local problems were tackled.

Sarah Hartwell was born and lives in England. Articles and excerpts from this site have been translated into Dutch, Danish, Japanese and other languages. Other hobbies have included photographic modelling, photography, woodwork, writing stories and poetry, drawing and being owned by a succession of cats!

The Resource Archive

The articles on Messybeast.com are drawn from a combination of personal experiences and additional research plus information contributed by correspondents. It is challenging and fascinating to combine facts and information from different sources, to interpret them in the light of personal experiences and to draw useful conclusions - much like putting together a jigsaw. As well as making useful information available in one archive, Messybeast.com aimed to present complex or scientific topics in plain English, bringing the information to a wider audience.

Messybeast.com is not affiliated to any individual cat registry or organisation and the information is not specific to any single country or organisation. Readers must bear this in mind, especially regarding different cat breeds and different styles of cat care: what is acceptable/valid in one country may be regarded as unacceptable/invalid (or as deformed or cruelty) in another; what is encouraged or tolerated by one registry may be banned outright by another.

While information in Messybeast.com is researched and provided on an impartial basis, the author reserves her right to express personal opinions and these are marked as such to distinguish them from factual content.

The Messybeast.com "Original Artwork" section contains a growing collection of black-and-white clip-art, re-scanned from original drawings produced for cat charities during the mid 1990s (this task is ongoing). The clip-art is royalty free and permission is granted for its use on websites, newsletters and school projects. It includes artwork by SMIFFY, an unknown cartoonist who contributed artwork anonymously to Cats Protection.