Weaning a kitten

When to wean depends on a number of things: the size of the litter, the state of the mother, and whether her milk is there at all and fit to feed on. A cat with a small litter will usually go on feeding her kittens until they are 6 to 10 weeks old, and sometimes until the next litter arrives. Weaning generally starts at 25 days.

Pick a milk replacer and work out how much goes into one feed. Look through the maker’s instructions again and make sure the mixture is meant for kittens of three or four weeks, or older. Dry food or wet will do. How much a kitten needs each day, by age, is set out in the tables under “Raising Orphaned Kittens”.

Weaning the kittens

To give the kittens an appetite, take the cat away from them two hours before their feed. Once they have eaten you can put her back to top them up. For the sake of their socialising, and to keep behaviour problems away, they should be fed together until they are at least six weeks old.

Dry food

Mix one part of food with three parts of water or milk replacer and warm it to room temperature. Put it in a shallow saucer, dip your fingers in it and let the kittens lick them clean. Feed them three or four times a day.

Once the kittens have got the idea, cut the liquid down by degrees until there is none of it left. The change to dry food alone usually falls at seven or eight months. The kittens take less and less of their mother’s milk. Cut her own food back too, if you have not already: it helps to dry her up.

Kittens that overeat may scour. It comes either of a kitten’s greed or of food it cannot digest properly. Cut the number of feeds for the time being and put the kittens back to their mother until the motions are normal again.

Canned food

Start by mixing ²/₃ of the tin with ¹/₃ water or milk replacer. Kittens need a great deal of water, and dehydration comes on quickly if they go short. Until weaning their mother’s milk covers all of it; after weaning they must have water freely.

Kittens on a concentrated, balanced kitten food need no vitamin or mineral supplements — which in that case do harm rather than good.

To dry the cat up, keep her off food and water for 24 hours. Then give her ¹/₄ of her proper ration, ¹/₂ the next day, then ³/₄, and after that feed her as an adult.

Between 10 and 14 weeks kittens grow open to infections of the airways and of the gut, because the colostral immunity they got from their mother’s milk has faded by then. Once ill they eat less — and this at an age when a kitten should be putting on 180 g a week or more. They stop growing and weaken, which lowers their resistance further still. Kittens of that age want particularly close watching, and the first thing they want is feeding properly. Vaccination, given at the right time, is the best guard there is against the worst of the diseases.