2010 September | You Got Cats | Cat Health, Facts, Adoption, Supplies & Kitten Care

Kitten Care: Growth Stages 8th Day to 8th Week

Kitten Care: Stages of Growth

8th Day to 4th Week:

A handful of cute kittens

During the 8th to 11th day, the kittens eyes will first open, but their vision will be blurry. Their first teeth will appear. Their ears are not yet fully opened. They may begin slight crawling, but are still very helpless and need to stay close to the mother cat. This is a good time to begin picking them up and holding them for a short time, if the mother allows it. The sooner kittens become accustomed to humans, the more socialized they will be.

After 12 days, the kittens will begin crawling around. Their vision is developing, although it is still blurry.

They will begin clumsy play with their littermates.

Two week old kittens

At first, kittens cannot walk, but crawl along on their bellies. After a while, they will start clumsy walking, but you will find that when they first start to walk, they hold their tails straight up. They need to coordinate their legs before they can coordinate the tail with them, too!

4th to 8th Week:

Four Week Old Kitten

As soon as the kittens can climb out of their nest, they will need their own litterbox. You will have to watch to make sure they don’t try to eat the litter.

At 4 weeks, you can add some mushy soft food to their diet, supplementing mom’s milk. Kittens seems to like baby cereal with milk. It’s too early yet to move to kitty food.

Keep a watch on them along with their mother, to keep their play area safe.

Kitten Playmates

At 8 weeks, their teeth come in. Now is a good time to be playing with them, socializing them to humans and also introducing them to scratching posts, so that they grow up knowing to pull their claws on “their” furniture and not yours. Speaking from experience, my kitten was born loving to chew on electrical cords. I am amazed that she didn’t electrocute herself. With their new teeth and love of biting and chewing, this can be a very important thing to keep an eye on.

Below is a short video on playing with little kittens. They love to wrestle and play with their brothers and sisters. Adding a human touch helps them to be accustomed to being handled by people and learning that it is fun (play!), feels good (tickle the tummy!), and not dangerous (No Hurts!).

Kitten Care: First Week Growth Stages

Kitten Care: Stages of Kitten Growth

Birth:

mother cat and newborn kittens

Kittens weight about 2-4 ounces at birth. During the birth process, each kitten will be delivered, then the mother cat will take the newborn, bite open the amniotic sac if she needs to, and clean the kitten off. There is usually a 1/2 to 1 hour delay between the delivery each of kitten, allowing her to care for each one as it comes out.

Kittens are born blind and deaf, but their sense of smell is strong, and they snuggle right up to the mother. They will even push each other out of the way to get to her teats. A newborn kitten will wind its tongue tightly around the mother’s teat and hang on to it for the first few days even while sleeping.

While nursing, kittens will knead on the mother’s stomach to stimulate the production of milk. You may find that your grown cat will still knead on your stomach (mine does), which seems to give comfort and help the bond grow between you and your cat.

During this early stage, the mother will clean their little behinds to keep them clean and massage their stomachs with their tongue to help to stimulate their digestive tracts. The kittens need to stay up close against their mother for her warmth, as they cannot yet regulate their own body temperature.

The First Week:

Little baby kitten

Usually, when the kittens are 2-3 days old, the mother moves out of the birthplace for short spells and later she will move the kittens to a new place one at a time. She moves them by picking them up by the back of the neck and carrying them. They will hang loosely when she does this and it doesn’t hurt them. You should let them mother care for her kittens and not hold them too much at first, as tempting as this will be.

Cat Food: What Cats Need to Eat

Cat Health: Cat Food Meat Nutrients

What do cats need to eat?

Cat's Teeth

First, let’s look at what they are. Most domestic cats are descended from African wild cats. When the Egyptians first began to farm and store food, this drew mice. The mice drew the wild cats, and the partnership between humans and cats began. The Egyptians were so grateful to the cats for helping to preserve their food, that they revered them as hunters and even worshipped them. Killing a cat was punishable by death, and cats were even mummified, they were so respected.

Interesting history, but this tells about what cats need. They need to eat meat. That’s what they were made for. Cats are carnivores. Most cats in the wild lived on mice, rabbits, and small game. They ate the meat, the bones, and even the intestines, which gave them the proteins, fats, calcium, and minerals they need to live.

There is a lot of debate today about cat food — should cats eat dry food, wet food, home-make food, or even raw meat? People are very passionate about what they think about this. The most obvious answer is that cats need meat. Many cat foods are made up of plant protein and what are termed “meat by-products.” A good cat food, wet or dry, should contain at least 50% meat. Without meat, cats will not get the nutrition they need, especially taurine, an amino acid present in meat proteins, but lacking in vegetable proteins such as soy. Lack of taurine can lead to blindness, heart problems, and even death.

Cat and Cat Food

Then the question is wet cat food or dry?

There are pro’s and con’s for both. Wet cat food provides more water, which wild cats get from their prey, as mammals are mostly made up of water. Even humans. However, wet cat food is more expensive, does not store as long as dry food, and can be more smelly. Especially in these economic times, if you have one cat food, then wet cat food can be a very healthy choice, but what if you have more than one cat? Also, there are some cats, like mine, that will not touch wet cat food, no matter how hungry they get. When I got her from the pound, she had been started on Purina Kitty Chow and dry food was all she will accept.

Dry food is cheaper, easier to store for longer periods, and helps prevent tooth and gum problems by helping to clean plaque from cats’ teeth.

Raw food would be most like what cats would catch in the wild, but there can be a problem with bacteria.

The best answer would seem to be to Read The Label on any cat food.

Make sure that it is mostly made from meat, not meat flavoring with mostly carbohydrates. Then, make sure your cat gets plenty of water.

For my cat, the best cat food I have found is from Wysong. Wysong Cat Nutrition

It is vet-created and vet-manufactured to be the closest thing to letting her hunt in the wild for her food. I have a friend who lives in the country. She has a cat that she locks up in the shed at night for protection and warmth, but she lets him out to hunt every morning. He came as a stray and will not live in the house. She took him to the vet last year when she took in her house cat, and they both checked out healthy. (She does put flea and tick medicine on him.) He lives on what he hunts and catches and is perfectly healthy. That’s the kind of diet cats are made to eat.