More About Us
Wee Paws Animal Sanctuary is a no-kill cat sanctuary located in a cage-free, home environment (find us on Petfinder). We sometimes rescue dogs and parrots, but our hearts belong to the kitties! Your donation is tax-deductible (click here for details), and we've been running our facility since 2004. Every penny donated to us is spent only on the care and upkeep of the animals. We do not draw salaries, and we don't have staff -- if you donate $10, the animals receive $10 in food or vet care. We specialize in caring for "unadoptable" cats, especially those who are elderly, chronically ill, are FIV+, or who have behavioral issues, but we also care for litters of orphaned kittens throughout the year. We have a special place in our hearts for pets whose owners have passed away, and endeavor to provide them with patience and understanding as they grieve. Our oldest resident (also our first) just turned 18. This website is a work in progress so please excuse any dead links -- first I feed the cats, then I clean the litterboxes, then I work on the website if there's time leftover!
Join our Mailing List
A Vote for Siobhan
Just added: Thanks to “Team Siobhan” for letting us know that Siobhan Magnus has an adopted tabby cat from a shelter in Rhode Island, and the kitty’s name is Ophelia!
You’d have to be living under a rock to not be familiar with the TV show, “American Idol”. Even if you haven’t made a point of watching it over the past nine seasons, you’re probably familiar with the names of some of the talented performers who’ve found success through the program. We’ve always enjoyed watching the show as a light way to wind down after a stressful day, but we’ve never picked up the phone to cast a vote for a particular contestant, not until this season when we first saw Siobhan Magnus. At first, we were thrilled with her amazing voice, but as the weeks passed, we started to admire the young woman for sticking to her convictions and for wearing her heart on her sleeve. It wasn’t really a surprise when an online profile of Magnus revealed that the independent and soft-spoken singer loves cats (all the smartest people do!), and we wanted to do something to thank her for entertaining us, and to encourage her to continue to embrace her inner “crazy cat lady”. We had a rescue cat who needed a name, and we had a cat lover we wanted to honor, so we put the two together and ended up with a very pretty black and white cat with a cute pink nose who now answers to the name of “Siobhan”. We think all the “American Idol” contestants are great, and we’re looking forward to more beautiful music from people like Crystal Bowersox and Lee DeWyze, but we can’t deny that Siobhan Magnus, with her desire to live her life as a cat (a life of sunbeams, food and belly rubs), and her gorgeous voice, has firmly won our hearts. We wish Magnus a long and successful career, because we know she’ll be a dedicated and outspoken advocate for the underdogs who need a champion, even if the underdogs are cats.
Above is a photo of the very pretty cat we now call “Siobhan”: She came from a high-kill shelter where she was scheduled to be euthanized not just once, but twice, and both times the vet in charge sent her back to the adoption floor because she was so sweet and gentle. We don’t know anything else about her background or how she ended up at the shelter, but she was once loved by someone and still shows some signs of grieving the loss of her former home. She’s gentle with us but also seems vaguely impatient, as if we’re keeping her from being someplace else and she wishes we’d let her go back to the family she remembers. She’d been spayed before she arrived at the shelter, and we have no way of knowing if she ever had a litter of her own, but she’s already shown herself to be a loving and patient foster mom to the younger kittens here, and she does seem to find comfort in spending time with the youngest cats. She came to us with a generic shelter name that she absolutely refused to respond to, but she definitely knows we’re speaking to her when we call her “Siobhan”! We asked her for a few of the reasons she identified with her human counterpart on “American Idol”:
Top Five Reasons Siobhan the Cat is supporting Siobhan Magnus to win “American Idol”
1. When asked the question, “If you could be any animal, which one would you choose?”, Magnus replied, “A cat because they’re so lucky. When I think of my cat, she’s my princess. She’s spoiled and fat. She just flops down, like ‘Rub my belly, please.’ And I do it.”
2. Magnus once played the Cheshire Cat in “Alice in Wonderland”, so she’s making honest attempts to infiltrate the minds of cats to better understand and appreciate them.
3. Magnus is from Cape Cod, and any place named after a fish must be full of people who are pro-feline.
4. Magnus’ song choices on AI seem especially designed to appeal to cats. “Wicked Game” is obviously about “accidentally” forgetting to retract your claws while playing with a human, and “Superstition” is about every silly thing people have believed (and occasionally still do believe) about cats. “Across the Universe” must have been written for a cat, because it’s about stuff flying and slithering and doing other things that make cats happy (it probably once mentioned “catnip”, too, but the word was lost to the anti-drug censors).
5. Magnus has a tattoo of Mary Poppins, who sang… What? It’s not Mary Poppins? Magnus has a tattoo of art by Edward Gorey, and Gorey was a man who would have felt right at home at Wee Paws. As a matter of fact, in this photo Gorey practically looks like he lived here!
Even though Siobhan is no longer competing on American Idol, we hope you’ll still support her in what will undoubtedly be a very successful career! If you want to know more about her, check out her official page on the American Idol website, or follow Team Siobhan on Twitter.