by Dawn Knight

Created on: February 20, 2009

My husband and I love cats. In fact we have 5, but the story I want to tell is about Sabrina.

In early December, 2003, my husband was looking at the Petfinder website, and he saw this tiny black cat named "Sheila" who was at our local shelter. He just said "I have to have her."

So on December 13th, 2003, we brought our newest baby home. We changed her name to Sabrina, (we already had 2 black males properly named Harvey, and Salem) She weighed a little over 2 lbs, and was so skittish. It was easy to tell she was feral. We were told she was 6-8 weeks old. Thinking this, her small size wasn't too much of a concern to us. But she seemed to have alot of trouble breathing.

We called the vet upon leaving the shelter, and he told us to bring her right away. He knew we had other cats at home and wanted to make sure she was healthy and had nothing to pass on to them. To our surprise she was almost 5 months old! Very malnutritioned, obviously extremely underweight. She had a respiratory infection, and lice from the shelter. She got all her shots, and we went home with lice treatment and antibodics for her. She had to be kept away from the other cats for a few days to give the medications time to work.

The first couple nights she was with us was very worriesome, not only because of her being sick, but she wouldn't let us touch her. We had to chase her and capture her to give her the medicaton, which was traumatizing for all involved.

We didn't really know too much about her background. All we knew for sure was that some man brought her to the shelter and left her.

A few days before Christmas 2003, I came home from work to find Sabrina under the Christmas tree, laying amongst the gifts. I got my camera and took a picture of her. I am happy to say that very picture of her won a spot in the "Cutest Pets from Around the Globe 2007."

Today, over 5 years later, Sabrina is still with us. She is a small cat, she only grew to the size of an 8 month old kitten. She is still skittish, only allowing my husband or I to touch her, and that is only when we move slow. She hides the majority of the time, but there are many nights that she will come and get on the bed with us at night. We can't talk loud to her and the doorbell will send her under the bed or in closet for hours.

We are pretty sure she suffered at someone else hands before we saved her, but we dont like to think about that too much. We love her and she loves to play fetch with pieces of paper, and hair ties. She's proof that even a feral can be a good pet, with patience, and she seems to know we saved her.

Learn more about this author, Dawn Knight.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.