Sunglass Cat doesn't mind the attention. She's been getting more of it than ever since competing on the Animal Planet special "America's Next Cat Star."
The 2-year-old cat with the bedazzled shades, whose real name is Bagel, doesn't wear them as a style statement or a gimmick. Born without eyelids, she needs them to protect her eyes from debris. In her usual home of Los Angeles, she often hits the beach with her owner, Karen McGill.
A Detroit native who moved to the West Coast about four years ago, McGill rescued Sunglass Cat from a shelter when the kitten was a few months old, and she originally meant for the cat to live with her daughter.
"She stuck her paw out. She was very cross-eyed. We were like, 'This one chose us,' " she remembers.
McGill had to nurse the underweight kitten back to health, sleeping on her daughter's apartment floor and feeding Bagel by hand every half-hour to help with her digestive problems. Then she discovered the eye condition, which led to three surgeries.
Because of those health issues, McGill wound up keeping Bagel at her place. She still has to monitor Bagel's eyes, putting in drops several times a day and plucking out lashes that grow inside instead of a normal lash line. Left unattended, they could scratch her corneas and lead to blindness, according to McGill.
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