The internet has a fairly low bar for celebrity news, but every once in a while something crosses the feed that stops the scroll for an entirely different reason. In late May 2026, a small nonprofit animal shelter in Ontario posted a plea on Instagram after taking in 27 cats and kittens from a single household. The post needed to reach a community of local donors. What it got, a few days later, was deadmau5.
The exchange was so brief it almost looked like a typo. The shelter had laid out the situation in detail, the animals, the costs, the urgency. And there in the comments, from one of the most recognizable names in electronic music, were three words: “I got you.” He wasn’t kidding.
The donation of $30,000 came after 27 cats and kittens were rescued from a home near Oakville, Ontario, Canada. For a non-profit operating entirely on donations, that figure covered the full cost of caring for every single animal in that group. All of it. At once. From a comment section.
The 27 Cats Nobody Had Ever Taken to the Vet
On May 27, the Humane Society of Oakville, Milton & Halton posted that it had just rescued 27 cats from a nearby household. Ranging from three months to three years old, none of the animals had ever been seen by a veterinarian. Not once. Not a single wellness check, not a single vaccine. A mix of kittens who had never known anything but that one house, and adult cats who had spent up to three years without any medical care at all.
The organization asked the community to help raise $30,000 to cover the cost of intake exams, vaccinations, spaying or neutering surgery, microchipping, and ongoing care to prepare the animals for adoption. The shelter was transparent about the math: 27 animals, every one of them starting from zero, was going to cost exactly that much. They weren’t padding the number. They were simply doing the accounting out loud and hoping the community would respond.
What they did not anticipate was who would respond.
“I Got You”
In the comments section, deadmau5, who does charitable work with the Toronto Humane Society and has three rescue cats of his own, swooped in a few days later and simply wrote, “I got you!” The shelter’s executive director, Jeff Vallentin, told Billboard that the moment landed with genuine surprise. “We’ve had many memorable moments at the shelter, but opening Instagram to find a message from deadmau5 was definitely one we didn’t see coming.”
Zimmerman, who volunteers with the Toronto Humane Society and has three rescue cats of his own, wired the full $30,000 ask without hesitation. There was no negotiation, no partial matching pledge, no announcement of a fundraiser to be matched later. He covered the entire bill.
The shelter’s response captured something real about what a moment like this actually means for a small nonprofit. Vallentin said: “It’s not every day that a local celebrity uses their platform to shine a spotlight on animal welfare and help introduce millions of people to our mission. The financial support will make a real difference for these cats and kittens, but the attention and engagement have been just as meaningful.” That second part matters. The $30,000 was essential. The audience that came with it – millions of people now aware that the Humane Society of Oakville, Milton & Halton exists and does this work – was a different kind of gift entirely.
The Man Behind the Mouse Head
For anyone who only knows deadmau5 as the Canadian DJ who performs inside a giant LED mouse helmet, the cat thing comes as a surprise. It really shouldn’t. Joel Zimmerman, who is the person inside that helmet, has been openly, almost aggressively, a cat person for most of his public life.
Meowingtons was adopted by Zimmerman from the Toronto Humane Society in 2009, around the time of his career breakthrough and the release of his 2008 effort, Random Album Title. The cat was with him through the whole ride – the festival headlines, the Grammy nominations, the internet arguments, the stadium shows. Meowingtons became famous alongside him, appearing in his livestreams, albums, and videos. He wasn’t a prop. He was, by every account Zimmerman ever gave, a companion.
Meowingtons passed away on August 8, 2023, at the age of 16 due to medical complications. Last year, Zimmerman released Meowingtons Simulator, a tribute to his late cat, developed under his own Oberha5li Studios banner and powered by Epic Games’ Unreal Engine – a rhythm-based rag doll game where players control a digitized, dancing Meowingtons in a virtual nightclub. That is not the behavior of someone who considers their pets an aesthetic choice. That is grief processed through the only medium the man knows.
All of his cats have been adopted, and his two most recent additions, Dizzy and Dolly, joined his family in September 2023 from Animal Adoptions of Flamborough in Ontario, after the death of Meowingtons earlier that year. And then, in June 2026, after the Oakville rescue went public, he added one more. This June, Zimmerman officially expanded his household, adopting a new cat to join his existing clowder of Peanut, Dizzy, and Dolly. Taking to Instagram to share the news, he introduced his latest companion: a charmingly grumpy three-year-old tabby. The feline, aptly named “Cathulhu,” was captured on video enjoying some affection from his new owner at the animal shelter.
The name Cathulhu, for the record, came from his fans. After making the donation, he posted to his Instagram Stories to ask fans for help naming all 27 cats, linking a Patreon page where submissions were being collected for a community vote. One fan, looking at Cat No. 3, a male tabby with dramatically curled white whiskers, suggested the name. The reasoning: “The crazy whiskers make perfect tentacles and those ears look like the wings!” – a reference to the H.P. Lovecraft monster. Zimmerman kept the name and kept the cat.
Why He Does It
Zimmerman has never dressed up his position on rescue adoption in particularly noble language. He’s more direct than that, and more specific. He has explained his reasoning plainly: “There’s just such an influx of [cats] that end up getting removed from the home or whatever, and then they’re off in the streets eating whatever and being cats, and then you have these litters of kittens and no one can look after them. They don’t all make it, and that’s a bummer.”
That’s the whole argument. No manifesto, no campaign language. Just the honest acknowledgment that there are animals in bad situations and people with the means to do something about it, and those two facts being true at the same time is the only prompt he needs.
The Reverb Shop and Toronto Cat Rescue
The Deadmau5 cat rescue donation was not an isolated act. It came as part of a month of feline-forward activity that appears, knowing what we know about Zimmerman, to have been very deliberately timed. Deadmau5 launched his Reverb Shop on June 2, coinciding with Adopt a Shelter Cat Month, featuring music gear, tour posters, merch and more, with a portion of the proceeds benefiting no-kill non-profit rescue organization Toronto Cat Rescue.
The shop itself is a collector’s event. It features autographed synthesizers, including a Korg microKORG, an Akai MPC Key 37, and a Moog Labyrinth, alongside deadmau5 x Telegrapher Fox Speakers and vintage tour posters featuring Professor Meowingtons. From a signed Korg to a poster of his late cat. The whole thing is very him.
Toronto Cat Rescue, the no-kill, volunteer-run organization receiving proceeds from the shop, operates in deadmau5’s home city and has been rescuing and rehoming abandoned, sick, and injured cats since 1994. That’s 30 years of no-kill shelter work in a city where the need has never gotten smaller. The proceeds from Zimmerman’s gear sale go there, on top of the $30,000 that went directly to the cats in Oakville.
June also happens to be Adopt a Shelter Cat Month, which runs through June and encourages people to consider adopting cats from local shelters. The timing of the shop’s launch on the first day of June was not accidental.
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What This Really Comes Down To
This story gets told as a feel-good celebrity moment and then moved past. The DJ helped some cats, wasn’t that nice, here’s what he wore to the festival. But the details don’t really let you do that. This is a man who adopted his first cat at the beginning of his career from a shelter, who lost that cat after 16 years and grieved him in public, who built a video game as a tribute, who volunteers with an animal welfare organization as a matter of routine, who sent $30,000 to a small Ontario shelter because he saw the post, and who then adopted one of the cats himself.
The Humane Society of Oakville, Milton & Halton didn’t get a celebrity endorsement. They got someone who had, for a long time before this, cared enough to act. The comment section was just where it became visible.
The 27 cats – now named, now receiving care, now with the weight of their medical costs fully covered – will find homes. Some of them will find homes faster because millions of people now know the shelter exists. One of them is already living in Joel Zimmerman’s house in Toronto, apparently sleeping wherever it wants and answering to the name Cathulhu.
That is, by any measure, an excellent outcome from three words in a comment section.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.