Raising Orphaned Kittens
A cat cannot rear her litter if she has complications after the birth: inflammation of the uterus or of the mammary glands, toxic milk, eclampsia, too little milk, or trouble with her nerves. In such cases the kittens have to be topped up, or hand-reared altogether.
Whether a kitten needs topping up can be judged from the look of it, from its hold on life, from its birth weight and from its size beside its littermates. As a rule the extra feeding is begun early and, if it comes to it, the kitten goes over to hand-rearing entirely, rather than waiting for it to fall seriously ill. Depending on how the kitten is and how it takes the extra feeding, it can be fed two or three times a day and left with its mother. Others are taken away and reared apart, and they need care of a particular kind.
If you decide that a kitten needs topping up, work out what it needs in a day and divide that into four feeds. Very small kittens are fed six times a day. Keep an exact record all the way through — with hand-rearing this is not optional. For the first four days from birth weigh them every 8 hours, up to the 14th day every day, and up to four weeks once every three days.
Three things matter above the rest: getting the temperature right, mixing and measuring the feed correctly, and looking after the kittens properly. Everything they are fed from must be spotless and boiled. Everyone should wash their hands before handling them, and above all if they have been near other cats. A great many diseases, feline viral respiratory disease among them, reach kittens by way of a person who has been with an infected cat.
Kittens that cannot get the colostrum, their mother’s first milk, have no passive immunity, and so are open to every kind of illness. From three weeks of age they are vaccinated.
You will need an incubator, because chilling is the single greatest danger to a newborn kitten.
The incubator
A plain incubator can be put together in a few minutes by dividing a cardboard box into compartments, so that each kitten has a pen of its own. The pens matter particularly when the kittens are on their own, because without a mother they suck each other’s ears, tails and genitals. From the third week the kittens should be back together for the sake of their socialising.
Temperature counts for a great deal here: there is no mother beside them, and nobody to warm a kitten that has grown cold. With no draughts about, the incubator sits at room temperature. A thick pad underneath will keep it off the floor. If more warmth is needed, hang infra-red lamps with a thermostat above it — and see that the heat does not reach one corner, so that kittens which grow too hot can crawl away into it.
Electric pads are less safe than lamps. Lying against one all the time, kittens can be burnt or dried out. Pads must be well covered and must take up no more than half the floor of the incubator.
Line each pen with a baby’s nappy, easily changed as it soils. It also lets you look at every kitten’s motions, which are an excellent guide to overfeeding and the first sign of illness.
Set the air temperature by the thermometer in the incubator. Through the first week hold it at 27–32 °C; through the second bring it down to 27–29 °C; then lower it by degrees, so that by the end of the fourth week it stands at 24 °C.
Keep the temperature and the humidity steady — about 55% — and keep the draughts out. It saves the skin from drying and the kitten from dehydration.
General care
Keep the kittens clean and on dry bedding. Watch the skin around the anus and on the belly, and wipe it with baby oil so that it does not dry out. Change the bedding often, or the skin will be rubbed raw; if that happens, dust the sore places with baby powder. If infection gets into the chafed and weeping skin, treat it with Neosporin ointment.
For the first three weeks massage each kitten’s belly and the area round the anus after every feed, to set off the passing of water and motions — which is what the mother does. It is best done with a swab dipped in water.
For the first two days of life kittens should, wherever possible, take their mother’s colostrum. With it they get all her antibodies and immunoglobulins, which give them their colostral immunity. Nowadays the difficulty is easily got round: there are milk replacers made for cats — KMR, Kitty lac, Nurturall, Just Born and others — and they have replaced baby formula, goat’s milk and the foster mother.
The table shows what the various milks contain.
Average analysis of milk in percentage content of dry substance
| Cat | Cow | Dog | Milk substitute | |
| Dry substance | 18 | 12 | 24 | 18 |
| Protein | 42 | 25 | 33 | 42 |
| Fat | 25 | 30 | 33 | 25 |
| Carbohydrates | 26 | 38 | 16 | 26 |
| kcal/100 ml | 90 | 70 | 150 | 100 |
Cow’s milk is the wrong composition for kittens. A prepared food is better. In an emergency, and only for the time being, kittens can be fed on a home-made mixture; stir it thoroughly and warm it before use, and keep what is left in the refrigerator.
Mixture No. 1: 240 ml of homogenised milk, 2 egg yolks, 1 teaspoonful of salad oil, 1 drop of liquid baby vitamins — 1.2 kcal/ml.
Mixture No. 2: 20% unsweetened sterilised condensed milk (1 part warm water to 5 parts condensed milk) and bone meal (1 teaspoonful to 1 litre of milk) — 1 kcal/ml.
Milk replacers are sold as liquids and as powders. The powder is made up with water as the maker directs on the packet. What is left over goes in the fridge. Never let the mixture freeze.
Working out the daily amount of milk
To find how much each kitten needs, weigh them and use the table below, which gives the calories.
Milk mixture needed by one kitten
| Age in weeks | Average weight (grams) | kcal per day | Milk mixture per day* (ml) | Maximum quantity of mixture per day (ml) | Number of feedings per day |
| 1 | 120 | 24 | 32 | 48 | 6 |
| 2 | 210 | 44 | 56 | 77 | 4 |
| 3 | 300 | 77 | 80 | 90 | 3 |
| 4 | 390 | 107 | 104 | 104 | 3 |
* Different milk replacers are much of a muchness in composition, but the amount needed may differ.
Divide the total for the day by the number of feeds to get the amount for one feed.
An example: a kitten weighing 120 g needs 24 kcal a day in its first week, which is 32 ml of milk. Divided by six feeds, that comes to 5–6 ml a feed.
Kittens born small and weak are the ones that suffer most from dehydration and chilling. Before such a kitten is given milk at all, the fluid it has lost must be put back. Give it a warm 5–10% solution of glucose in water, or Pedialyte, 4 ml every hour or two, until the kitten is warm and the signs of dehydration have gone. After that it can have milk: work out the amount for the day and feed it every four hours. Older, bigger kittens are fed three times a day. A kitten that will not take its whole share at one sitting should be fed more often and less at a time.
A kitten that has had enough has a belly that feels full to the hand, but neither distended nor hard. Fed from a bottle, it may show a little froth of milk at the mouth. Do not overfeed — it leads to diarrhoea!
The ration suits a kitten if it hardly cries after a feed, gains weight, feels solid, passes motions four or five times a day, and those motions are light brown. Increase the amount by degrees, following the table.
From three weeks most kittens begin to lap the milk from a saucer. From four weeks dry kitten food can be added to it, and that is the time to move the kitten on to dry food.
How to give the feed
Kittens can be fed from a baby’s bottle or through a stomach tube. Hold the kitten upright, head up, so that the milk does not go down into its airways. The milk should be at room temperature.
The bottle has the advantage of answering the sucking reflex, but it also asks strength of the kitten that a weak one may not have. With a small doll’s bottle, or a feeder with a soft teat, the hole in the teat has to be opened up until the milk comes slowly — otherwise the kitten tires before it has taken enough. It must not be too large either: milk coming too fast can choke the kitten.
The right position for bottle-feeding is lying on its chest and belly, back uppermost. Do not hold the kitten in your arms like a baby — the milk can go down its windpipe.
Open the kitten’s mouth gently, put the teat in and hold the bottle at 45°, which keeps air out of the stomach. Draw the teat out a little and let it back, and the kitten starts to suck. After a bottle feed a froth of milk appears at the mouth. A kitten that drinks slowly will take five minutes over a feed, or more. Afterwards massage its belly a little to bring up the wind.
A sick kitten, or one behind its age, is better fed through a tube (catheter) Rose Floyd scheme
Tube feeding has several advantages: 1) a feed takes no more than two minutes; 2) no air is swallowed, so there is nothing to bring up. The kitten also gets exactly the amount it should. It is the only workable way to feed kittens that are behind in their growth, or ill, or too weak to suck at their mother.
Too much milk, or milk given too fast, generally brings it back up, and that can end in the milk being drawn into the lungs and in pneumonia. The trouble is avoided by building the kitten’s weight back gradually and working out the day’s amount properly. Tube-fed kittens should be kept apart from each other, in a separate room or in the pens of the incubator, so that they come to no harm: they suck at anything within reach, one another included.
Tube feeding is not difficult, and takes a few minutes to learn. You need a soft rubber catheter (size 5 for small kittens, 8–10 French for bigger ones; the chemist has them), a glass or plastic syringe of 10 or 20 ml, and baby scales, to weigh each kitten and see what it is gaining. A kitten’s stomach lies level with the last rib. Measure the tube from the mouth to the last rib and mark it there with a strip of sticking plaster. Draw the milk into the syringe, leaving no air bubbles, and warm it to body heat by standing it in hot water.
Wake the kitten and lay it on its chest and belly, horizontally. Wet the end of the tube with milk and let the kitten lick it. Open its mouth and pass the tube slowly over the back of the tongue and into the throat. The tube is too thick to go down the windpipe, so there is little chance of that happening; passed smoothly, it is swallowed. Feed it in as far as the mark, or until you feel resistance. Fit the syringe to the tube and run the milk slowly into the stomach.
Take the tube out and lift the kitten upright so that it can bring up any wind. Wipe the anus and the genitals with a wet swab, which sets off the passing of water and motions.
By 14 days the windpipe in most kittens has grown wide enough for the tube to go down it. If the tube goes the wrong way the kitten coughs and chokes. Take a thicker one (8–10 French) — or, if the kittens are stronger now and can suck for themselves, put them on the bottle.
The commonest mistakes in feeding
The commonest mistakes are overfeeding and underfeeding. Both bring on diarrhoea and upset the gain in weight. If a kitten puts on 10 g a day, looks contented and quiet, and its motions are normal — firm and light brown — then it is being fed correctly.
Experience shows that owners are more likely to overfeed or underfeed an orphaned kitten than to get it right, and the motions will tell you which.
Kittens fed four times a day should empty themselves four or five times, or after every feed.
The first sign of overfeeding is a loose motion. Loose and yellow means the overfeeding is slight: dilute the milk with a third of water, and go back to the ordinary strength as soon as the motions firm up.
With moderate overfeeding the food moves through the gut faster, which turns the motions greenish — the colour of bile that has not been absorbed. Here the milk has to be halved with water, or with Pedialyte instead of water, and 2–3 drops of Kaopectate can be added. Feed every four hours, and as the motions come right, bring the milk back up to strength by degrees.
Constant overfeeding exhausts the digestive enzymes and turns the motions grey. Where the food is digested badly or not at all, they are curdled, like milk that has turned, and the kitten dries out fast. Leave the milk off altogether until the fluid it has lost has been put back.
For dehydration, give a solution of electrolytes — a balanced paediatric solution such as Pedialyte. The chemist has them, and so does the vet. The dose is 1.0 ml per 50 g of body weight per hour, from a bottle or through the tube. Every three hours add Kaopectate to the electrolyte solution, a drop for every 10 g the kitten weighs. Call the vet at once. Other things are done as well — warming a chilled kitten, for one — and giving the electrolyte solution under the skin is extremely effective.
Any kitten passing grey or white motions should be seen by a vet, since they can go with an infection of the newborn.
Kittens that are not getting enough mew without stopping, are listless and dull, gain slowly or not at all between feeds, keep trying to suck one another and begin to shiver. Hold the incubator at the proper temperature. Underfeeding dries a kitten out quickly.
Constipation is very rare indeed. Some kittens pass motions less often than they should, and there is no cause for alarm in that, unless of course the motions grow so hard that the kitten strains visibly. Its belly may swell and feel hard to the hand. For constipation, give an enema of soapy water from an eye dropper: 2–3 full droppers after each feed. Liquid paraffin will do instead, up to 5 ml. By mouth, give magnesium hydroxide: 3 drops for every 30 g the kitten weighs.
When a kitten is being hand-reared, do not forget to massage the area round the anus and the genitals with a damp swab after every feed — it sets off what the kitten would otherwise not manage for itself.