Everywhere in the world, we can observe and be touched by acts of kindness. People from all walks of life, faiths, and cultures extend themselves beyond the call of duty to help others unconditionally. Through their noble deeds, humanity as a whole is elevated.

To commend virtuous actions and encourage more people to be inspired by their examples, Supreme Master Ching Hai has lovingly created a series of awards, including the Shining World Leadership Award, Shining World Compassion Award, Shining World Hero and Heroine Awards, Shining World Honesty Award, Shining World Protection Award, Shining World Intelligence Award, and Shining World Inventor Award, to recognize some of the most exemplary, generous, caring, and courageous people who walk amongst us.

Ho Ho Ho! Season’s greetings, warm-hearted viewers! Christmas is just around the corner; a day celebrating the birthday of Master Jesus Christ. On this joyous occasion, our hearts are in full bloom; the spirit of Christmas lifts our souls as a sweet loving chorus fills the air. The smiles of people everywhere herald the coming of Christmas, a time of miracles. The Nine Lives Foundation in Northern California, USA, a recipient of the Shining World Compassion Award, honors the miracle of life every day!

There is not a single time, even if it’s five years in the future that I will not accept one of my cats back if something happens; the home changes, there is a divorce, and there is an allergy that presents, we’ll always take our cats back no questions asked, we just want to make sure that they are safe back with us, we don’t want them to ever go through the shelter system again.

It all started in 2003 when Monica Thompson, a compassionate animal doctor who has practiced veterinary medicine for over a decade founded a nonprofit veterinary hospital, called the Feline Well-Care Clinic.

I’ve been a vet for almost 11 years, and graduated from Washington State University (USA), but I’m a California (USA) resident and worked in private practice for about four years when I first graduated. And then I started helping some rescue foundations around the Bay Area (Northern California), and I started to really feel that I had an itch that I hadn’t explored before in veterinary school, so I started working for a few of the organizations.

I started a little tiny clinic called the Feline Well-Care Clinic, which originally was supposed to do vaccines and de-worming and, toenail trims. And over the first six to eight months I became so popular that I had to expand my one-room practice into a three-room practice.

Besides her regular work at the clinic, Dr. Thompson also began rescuing cats from local shelters that she worked at.

My first mission was to try to help rescue kitties that were in shelters, that had some kind of medical or physical disability, that were going to be passed over or euthanized. Usually it was because of an injury, an abscess, a fracture, an eye missing, chipped teeth, or scabs on their body from being covered in fleas. And all those cats, because there are such space issues in most shelters, are discarded right away. They don’t even make it to the adoption floor so someone has a chance to look at them.

In my first week working at a local shelter, I had taken 17 cats on my first day, and 58 by the end of the week, all were doomed for euthanasia, all of which I saved, made well again and adopted out.

In the following year, Dr. Thompson established the Nine Lives Foundation, a community-based nonprofit organization, comprised of her clinic and a no-kill cat shelter.

The Feline Well-Care Clinic is actually where I get the money to support my foundation. I spend six or seven days a week working in my clinic to make money to keep my foundation running, so it kind of all runs together. We house about 220 cats at any time in a 5000 square foot building.

“No-kill” means the cats that are taken in are never euthanized, except for a humane reason such as pain and suffering or when a cat has severe medical problems with a poor prognosis.

A lot of the organizations and facilities around the Bay Area call themselves “no-kill.” What that means is they won’t euthanize an animal for space, but they may not accept it in their organization if it has a disability or difficulty.

So we are very different in that respect, that we do not discriminate based on injury or illness, those are actually the ones that I look for. It’s very gratifying to be able to take a cat who looked like there’s no way he would come back from his terrible situation, and get him (healed) in six to eight months, in six to eight months, on him and send him for adoption.

Dr. Thompson is a strong advocate of spaying and neutering felines so that kittens who potentially will have no one to look after them are not born.

Cats are able to procreate so many times per year and it, with so many offspring per time that just leaving two unaltered cats alone for seven years you’ll have over 450,000 offspring. So if you know of someone in your neighborhood that’s cast out their male or female and just moves away and leaves them outside, if they were to get together and start having kittens, seven years from now you might have made almost half a million unwanted kittens in that neighborhood.

Let’s now meet some of the brave patients at the clinic!

This kitty here, we almost lost her because she had a very, very weird skin condition all underneath her belly where her skin was just being eating away. Dr. Thomson did not want to give up on her and we put her under anesthesia, cleaned her up. We had to suture where all the skin was sloughing off and just give her antibiotics and a lot of TLC (tender loving care) and she’s thriving now. Her skin’s all better, it’s grown back a different color, (Yes) but she’s all better.

You could see where all the white is back here, is where she had the problems. She’s a beautiful kitty. She’s shy but she’s doing really well. These two kitties were born with a condition where they were born without eyelids.

Dr. Thompson did do a surgery on both of them actually to kind of lift their eyelids up a little bit because there is also what’s called entropion, where the fur will curl under and scrape the eyeballs, so what she did was an entropion surgery to fold the fur back up so it doesn’t get in the eyes, and they’re doing very well. One eyed boy, he’s just the sweetest little thing ever, but he’s a very old boy. He had some problems with being able to go poop.

So Dr. Thomson did some surgery on him and he’s really happy now. He is a very regal boy. He very quietly sits up and looks at you with his one eye and just asks for food very nicely and polite. Jack. Here sweetie. Hey! We love him too, he’s a great, great old man.

Before approving an adoption, the Nine Lives Foundation makes sure that whoever is the potential human-daddy or mommy is a good fit with the cat so that the feline friend will be truly happy and comfortable in their new residence.

A screening process is really important because we want to make sure our cats go into permanent homes. Our screening process really involves us getting to know the people that we’re adopting from, and our facility allows them to come and mill around and be there for many hours. Our adoption counselors kind of get to know the personality, and we watch the way the cats respond to the adopters.

If we sense there is any mismatch, the cat is not comfortable being picked up by this person then we’ll decline that person for that particular cat, and try to move them toward a cat that we feel is a better match. So we’re very interactive, it’s not just a piece of paper that they fill out, we really want to make sure that there is a match, that there is a match that’s going to last for a lifetime. And a lot of times people say that they pick our cats, because they’re almost chosen by our cats.

They’ll go and sit in the middle of a big enclosure, and the cat will come up and jump on their lap, and they’ll say, “I never would have looked at you, but here you are on my lap, and you seem comfortable with me, and I’m happy that you’re here,” and I would say 50 or more percent of the time that’s how we find our matches, the cats help us that way.

The Foundation’s philosophy is that when kittens below a certain age are adopted, they need to have family support so that they can better adapt to their new home.

We want our kittens always to go in pairs. We feel that taking a kitten out of a situation where he may have been with all his brothers and sisters for the first eight weeks of his life, taking him out as a single and casting him into a home and having him left at home all day, not only leads to behavior problems, scratching of furniture, climbing curtains, biting, but it leads to a cat who’s lonely and depressed.

And we really want cats again to find their forever home and a good match for them. So any kittens under six months are adopted in pairs, unless our prospective family has another cat at home who is of appropriate age.

For those cats that are not adoptable due to a severe medical condition or other reasons, they need not worry. The Nine Lives Foundation promises lifetime care.

Maybe 10 to 15% of our population are cats that really aren’t adoptable. We would consider them special needs, so we’ll let them go out to foster care, then we’ll take care of all the medical expenses for people who will foster for us, but there really are 20 to 30 cats that really, their time is limited, or they have a physical disability that really precludes them from having a normal life, that someone really who wants a cat might want to have.

We have many cats who require fluids every day, medication, periodic X-rays, blood work, routine blood work on some of my cats. Hyperthyroid cats, kidney cats, cancer cats, we run the gamut.

Our sincere thanks Dr. Monica Thompson and Nine Lives Foundation volunteers for your selfless love and dedication in nursing injured and ill felines back to health and helping them to find good homes.

For more details on the Nine Lives Foundation, please visit:

There are more miracles to come! Please join us again tomorrow on Animal World: Our Co-Inhabitants for part two of our program where we’ll meet Christopher the Miracle Cat who overcame life-threatening injuries and now helps care for and heal others in the clinic as well as see the presentation of the prestigious Shining World Compassion Award to the Nine Lives Foundation.

Sincere viewers, thank you for your company today on our program. Coming up next is Enlightening Entertainment, after Noteworthy News. May our world be filled with noble thoughts and deeds.