1. Our 12 associations are joining forces to feed 295 senior cats that no one will adopt.

We are 12 associations, from Roubaix to Annecy, from the Pas-de-Calais to the Pyrénées-Orientales, and we have 295 senior cats to feed! Not one of us can manage it alone, so we are asking for these cans together, to share them out equally between our twelve organisations.

Senior cats are the ones nobody asks for. They come to us after their owner has died, after a move into a care home, after years of family life, or from a feeding site where they have grown old outdoors. Adopters judge them too old. So they stay with us for months, sometimes until the end of their lives...

This winter, at the association Aux Poilus du 33, Robin, an old ginger tomcat, lay huddled in the cold and the rain for three days before anyone noticed him. He refused to eat or drink. He had to be rehydrated and fed with a syringe.

2. Teeth pulled out, muscle wastage, worn-out kidneys: without food suited to them, our senior cats can no longer feed themselves.

With an elderly cat, everything starts with the mouth. At La Vraie Magie des chats, most of the seniors taken in have had to have teeth pulled out; their oldest, Ninette, 19, lost an eye, removed after a glaucoma.

Among our seniors, the diagnoses pile up: gingivitis, muscle wastage in the hindquarters, kidney failure, chronic cat flu, tumours. A cat with sore gums gives up on kibble. A cat that does not drink enough becomes constipated, loses its appetite, then its weight.

We can carry out the extraction, the blood test, the drip. But the treatment counts for nothing if the cat does not eat afterwards! For mouths like these, there is only one way out: canned food with a fine texture, one they can swallow without having to chew and that they actually manage to finish.

3. We are launching this campaign for special senior canned food to feed them.

A cat with no teeth can do nothing with a bag of kibble, and ordinary wet food, full of chunks, he sniffs at and leaves. What he needs is food made specifically for seniors: a texture fine enough to be swallowed just as it is, water in every mouthful, a smell strong enough to wake up an appetite that has gone out, and no cereals, no sugar, no soya, so as not to strain tired digestive systems.

And that is exactly what we never receive. At supermarket checkouts, people hand us kibble and food for adult cats; the senior recipe, which costs more, stays on the shelf. That is why we are asking for it here, and nowhere else.

You can give us cans of Animonda Vom Feinsten Senior: they make up a complete, balanced meal formulated specially for cats over 7.

If this campaign succeeds, Animal Webaction will deliver the donated cans to our 12 associations, where they will be shared out equally, enough to feed our 295 senior cats without worry for several months.

4. Because of the heat, we have to triple portions to keep our senior cats hydrated, and we have no budget to pay for them.

We have no guaranteed budget for food. Our 12 organisations run on volunteers and donations from individuals, and several of us receive no public funding at all: every last portion of canned food was first collected or bought.

And the bill keeps going up. At Le Jardin des Chats, these months of heatwave have forced the team to double, sometimes triple, the amount of wet food handed out to keep the old cats hydrated. Even so, some have gone on losing weight, to the point of needing a drip. Meanwhile, dental extractions and long-term treatments swallow up everything else.

5. We are not asking for a single euro, only canned food to see us through to winter.

We are not asking for money. We are asking for food. What senior canned food we have left is running out faster than we can replace it, and there is nothing to replace it.

Without this food, a cat with no teeth does not eat. Without this food, a cat that has stopped drinking ends up on a drip. Without this food, at the École du chat de Roubaix, the foster carer of an old male who turned wild again after being abandoned would have had no way of winning back his trust: a can held out every day is also what brings a cat back out from under a bed.

6. Who will receive the canned food from this campaign?

The donated canned food will be delivered and shared out equally between the 12 independent associations in our collective:

• Les Ailes de Mitzie (62)
• École du chat, comité de défense des bêtes libres de Roubaix et environs (59)
• CAPPA / SPA du Pays du Neubourg, maison de retraite féline (27)
• Contrôle et Protection des Chats Andréens (66)
• Les Poilus du 33 (33)
• La Vraie Magie des chats (33)
• SPA de Loire-Atlantique (44)
• Chat l'heureux 62 (62)
• Le Jardin des Chats (43)
• SPA Annecy Marlioz (74)
• Les Chats du Cœur de Longvic (21)
• SOS Animaux Moineville (54)