austindogandcat.com

austindogandcat.com

Monday, July 27, 2009

Austin woman raises money through Internet in two days for cat's surgery

He's very sweet, and he likes string cheese

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, including $1,400 from an anonymous person who said the donation came from "Nunya," meaning "none of your business," Smith said.

For the rest of the story in the Austin American-Statesman click here.


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