Saturday, August 01, 2009

Once Again, Texas Leads the Way

Donors act fast to help cat with no eyelids: The first thing Dawn Shepherd noticed was the loud yowling coming from the live trap she had set outside an abandoned house in Taylor one June night.

When she looked inside the cage she saw a brown tabby with a strange expression on its face. "He looked like he had been bitten by a snake because he was squinting and his cheeks were really big," she said.

Shepherd took the cat to the Austin Humane Society to get it neutered and got a far worse diagnosis. The 2-year-old cat was missing big sections of its eyelids. It couldn't blink or produce any natural lubrication to clear its eyes. Without surgery it would eventually go blind.

Shepherd, a bookkeeper for the Central Texas Cat Hospital in Round Rock, said she started crying when she heard the diagnosis and immediately called Sheila Smith, founder of a nonprofit group called Shadow Cats, which provides care for feral and stray cats.

Smith, who co-owns Central Texas Cat Hospital with her husband, Dr. Roy Smith, sent out a plea in the first part of July through her nonprofit group's Web site and through Craigslist for donations to pay for the surgery needed to repair the eyelids of the cat Shepherd named "Noble."

In two days she received the needed $2,000.

2 comments:

Stephen B. said...

That's a very sad and wonderful story. I'm a softy usually when it comes to animals or some cats. And, I had a bird I named "Noble".

texaswatch said...

I've heard this phrase so many times. It's obvious that Texas would be a great place to live, since it's so developed.