A tiny kitten was abandoned on my daughter’s porch today,and when it had been screaming its head off for more than six hours, the predictable phone call was placed.
I figure that she’s about ten days old.
Mine was 10 days old when handed to me by another PhD student (telling me since my cat had just died I needed another). This was between written and oral PhD comps. Just what I needed. Not. l needed to study and not be tired due to feeding a kitten every 3 hours. I gave up on the bottle as mine just didn’t get the hang of it and used a syringe (being careful not to put too much in her mouth).
Remember to keep wiping her butt after you feed her so that she pee’s and poops. If you keep wiping gently with a damp, warmer paper towel she will go. She can’t do that on her own yet - that is why mama’s lick their babies’ butts.
Be aware they can’t regulate their body heat very well at that age. Initially I kept her in a t-shirt pocket of a t-shirt I was wearing until she outgrew that. She was very calm over my heart and felt secure. That also safely kept her warm. I finally took a Cambodian scarf (weave is very loose, wore it diagonally across my body and carried her around in there when she outgrew my pocket.
At night I had her in a box on my bed, I had a cat heating pad I took out of a heated cat bed I already had, covered it with a towel or small piece of fleece, pushing my hand against it to see how warm it got (folding the towel until it was good. Then I put fluffed up pieces of fleece around the sides of the box so she had ways to cuddle up and put her stuffed animal in there (see below for more on that). She’d often crawl under one of the animal’s legs up against it’s belly or lie across the neck of it.
Be careful if you are using a human heating pad. They can get too hot (and some turn off after an hour or two). A warmed water bottle (eg the ones you buy in the store with water already in them) wrapped in a towel can help but that only stays warm a couple of hours. Also a smaller very soft and squishy stuffed animal she can crawl on and snuggle up against helps. Make sure it is polyester filled as eventually they may make a hole and feathers, beads, etc. are not safe for kitties.
My vet told me that mine was 10 days old and at that age had about a 50% chance of living. Mine died several years ago at 3 weeks shy of 20.
@Kidsandliz This one is off to a rocky start. She’s active, but has not yet fully grasped the concept of the replacement for mama in the form of the syringe with the soft baby-animal nipple slipped onto the needle mount. She keeps trying to bite the nipple off. I’ll make a better lash-up in a little while, and see if she’s more willing with that. She’s also infested with fleas, much worse than one this young ought to be, and I’ve dusted her with diatomaceous earth as an initial control method. She’s way too tiny for any of the packaged doses of topical flea stuff, and trying to titrate the dose down enough to be safe is really dicey, so I just have to work with what is known safe.
Skip the nipple. Just syringe into her mouth a little bit at a time. That is what I had to do. I held mine on her back angled her body up with her head cradled in several fingers (to control it) and had to very gently pry her mouth open initially, sticking the syringe end in (works better at the side of her mouth and not in the center) until she tasted it and got the hang of it. Mine never did figure out how to use a nipple. Would just bite it and not suck. Even when I made the hole a lot bigger. Might try making the hole bigger.
Fleas. Warm water in the sink and dunk her. Keep water out of her ears and off her face. The fleas will climb to her head. Brush them off or flea comb them off. Water may well end up blood colored (did with mine). Likely you will need to hold her by the nape of her neck to keep her underwater and relatively still except for her face. It takes 5-10 seconds for a flea to drown. your goal is to drown them. I held mine more or less on her back with her head above water, the rest of her body under. Easier to keep her from inhaling water that way. The reflex to curl up/hold still when gripped by the nap of the neck will help.
Then take a warmed towel (hair dryer can do that), wrap her in that rubbing her dry, switching to dry warm towels. May have to do that several days in a row, several times a day. Don’t give her the stuffed animal until you have her defleaed or you will have baby fleas living on that.
@werehatrack PS fleas only spend a short period of time on the cat’s body and most of the time off them. Make sure you give her clean towels, fleece bits after each time you clean her. If you start finding fleas in the house vacuum over and over and immediately dump the dust outside (or you will just get them climbing out of the vacuum - same when you suck fruit flies out of the air - don’t ask me how I know that LOL). The vibrations encourage the eggs to hatch so you can get rid of them faster which helps get rid of everything faster.
Also she needs to feel like she is sleeping by you. Not safe to have her in the bed in case you roll over on her - that is why the box so if she cries you can talk to her and put a hand in there petting her. If you get very lucky one of your other cats may decide their job is to mother her. That will solve the keep her warm problem. You may then have they where did they park her problem to then feed her. The box is easier for that.
@Kidsandliz So far, all of the others are actively disinterested in this noisy little furball. But I think I got enough KMR into her on the first session, because she’s happily asleep in the box now. (It’s actually a cat carrier sitting on its end with a bedpad in the bottom. I have a bunch of rags I can cycle through as bedding to help with the deflea project.)
@Kidsandliz Thirty years ago, for just one night, we had a seven-day-old orange kitten that would only sleep on my hand. I moved into what was then the guest bedroom, propped myself up on some pillows, and carefully snoozed with the kitten all night.
@Kidsandliz@werehatrack When I was given young flea infested kittens the vet told my to bathe them with Palmolive dish detergent. It does kill the adult fleas quick but I’m not sure if your kitty is too young. Definitely put Palmolive and water in the bowl to dip the comb into so the fleas don’t get away.
Thanks for being so kindhearted to the poor baby.
@werehatrack She is going to need something warm in there with her or she will die of hypothermia. That is one of the big reasons why babies being raised by humans die. She can’t regulate her own body heat well and can’t generate enough heat on her own. If nothing else put a human heating pad on low in there with enough towels on top of it that it is only 101 degrees (a cat normal temp is around 101 or so) on the surface when you press the thermometer into the towel. Or since you have to feed her every couple of hours use the water bottle heat method (again watch the temp).
If it is more than you want to handle call the no kill shelters and whomever is stocking Petsmart and Petco and any other stores with cats (all of these places the cats are not “owned” by the store, rather by shelters who also take care of them. If there isn’t a phone number on the tag at the cages ask the manager), tell them you have a 10 day old kitten that needs a foster. Usually these places have people who foster babies who need bottle fed.
Fleas can be gotten rid of by flea combing daily and killing the fleas in soapy water. If the infestation is bad the kitten can be bathed in dawn dishwashing soap. NO flea medicated soaps yet! Wash bedding in hot and dry on high to kill the flea eggs and juveniles. A bad flea infestation can actually kill very small kittens so it is nothing to sneeze at.
@BelleGunness A really bad flea infestation can kill an adult, too. But there, it’s easier to stop. A tab of capstar, a bath, topical flea meds, nuke the bedding with metaphorical fire; problem can be solved. This poor little thing had flea dirt all over, down in her fur, so the first step was the dusting (because she was already stressed), and now that she has figured out the food situation (yay! She emptied a 6cc syringe by herself!) I will probably do the bath a little later. Right now, she’s curled up in fresh towels, in the back end of a carrier positioned in the exhaust of the fridge (nice, gentle warm air.) Assuming all goes well, I hope to have her terrorizing the rest of the bunch in a couple of weeks, and stealing their gooshy along about Halloween. And then I need to find a foster for her, in an adoption program that does decent vetting. I think she’s going to be a good one. (I think this is a “she”, anyway; at this age, hard to be sure.)
I volunteer in shelters. You’d be more likely to find a shelter (eg no kill) if you start calling around now telling them you can foster at no cost to them until she is old enough to adopt rather than start when she is of that age where she is ready. Shelters are generally full to overflowing. There are still a ton of kittens being born now. The odds are high you will be turned away repeatedly. Some people abandon the kittens then in a cardboard box with air holes shortly before the shelter opens. That decreases the odds they will accept yours.
The places that sell kittens through pet shops have the problem of fostering them until there is a cage open. That’s you’d foster helps. At least the ones around here (I cleaned cages for one of them) does screen families and do turn people down.
@Kidsandliz I have the names of several of those, but their level of usefulness varied in the past. I guess it’s time to make the phone calls again. At least this little one is showing signs of being a potential winner. And OMG can she purr! I have never seen one this young rattle this loud!
@werehatrack Starting telling the story of this cat on the social media platform nextdoor. You’ll get cat lovers invested they story and one may decide to adopt her as they feel connected to her. There you can click on their names and see what main threads they have started in the past to get a sense of them. You can also search on them to see what they have posted in the past. If she is all black it will be harder to find her a home (too much superstition) and don’t even think about finding her a home until well past halloween (many shelters around here won’t adopt out black cats from the end of Sept to the middle of Nov).
@Kidsandliz Solid black, and that’s part of why I wasn’t initially planning to look for a placement until after the date. OTOH, the upward blip in demand for black kittens as genuine pets has not completely subsided here yet; it hit hard when Black Panther came out, and there’s still some lingering positive vibe from it. That didn’t happen everywhere, from what I heard.
Kitten update: This morning, she greedily pulled in 11cc of KMR in one go, and then basically went back to sleep. She’s going to become a lap pest real soon now, this is obvious.
@Kyeh Alex. He’s probably responsible for one of the secondary sets. He’s a big boy. Hard to tell except for the dent he’s putting in the pillow. Black cats are good cats
Kitten has had another bath, and is much closer to actually being clean now; I think this round got most of the remaining fleas. (There were a lot of them initially.) The kitten clearly was very happy to sit inside the towel swaddle and get attention while her fur dried. (She’s still much too small to either allow to air dry uninsulated or to try to refluff with a blow-dryer.)
@werehatrack And this morning, she has developed a more expressive voice, and she’s perceptibly stronger. And did I mention that she’s teething? All good signs. Today, she gets to ride with me to Killeen so that I can empty the T-shirts out of my minivan.
The kitten, having been given an interim designation of “fuzzy bean”, is currently engaged in exploring my feet and their immediate environs. She’s still tiny, but expanding. Still teething, but more so. I am starting to understand why many feral momcats tend to cut the kids loose around 10 weeks, sometimes sooner.
That is a cute kitteh. Please pass along some head skritches from me.
How old do you think it is?
@tinamarie1974 No more than 10 days; the eyes are open, but the ears were not fully erect when I picked her up.
@werehatrack aaawww sweet kitty. Glad they found someone to take care of them.
Mine was 10 days old when handed to me by another PhD student (telling me since my cat had just died I needed another). This was between written and oral PhD comps. Just what I needed. Not. l needed to study and not be tired due to feeding a kitten every 3 hours. I gave up on the bottle as mine just didn’t get the hang of it and used a syringe (being careful not to put too much in her mouth).
Remember to keep wiping her butt after you feed her so that she pee’s and poops. If you keep wiping gently with a damp, warmer paper towel she will go. She can’t do that on her own yet - that is why mama’s lick their babies’ butts.
Be aware they can’t regulate their body heat very well at that age. Initially I kept her in a t-shirt pocket of a t-shirt I was wearing until she outgrew that. She was very calm over my heart and felt secure. That also safely kept her warm. I finally took a Cambodian scarf (weave is very loose, wore it diagonally across my body and carried her around in there when she outgrew my pocket.
At night I had her in a box on my bed, I had a cat heating pad I took out of a heated cat bed I already had, covered it with a towel or small piece of fleece, pushing my hand against it to see how warm it got (folding the towel until it was good. Then I put fluffed up pieces of fleece around the sides of the box so she had ways to cuddle up and put her stuffed animal in there (see below for more on that). She’d often crawl under one of the animal’s legs up against it’s belly or lie across the neck of it.
Be careful if you are using a human heating pad. They can get too hot (and some turn off after an hour or two). A warmed water bottle (eg the ones you buy in the store with water already in them) wrapped in a towel can help but that only stays warm a couple of hours. Also a smaller very soft and squishy stuffed animal she can crawl on and snuggle up against helps. Make sure it is polyester filled as eventually they may make a hole and feathers, beads, etc. are not safe for kitties.
My vet told me that mine was 10 days old and at that age had about a 50% chance of living. Mine died several years ago at 3 weeks shy of 20.
@Kidsandliz This one is off to a rocky start. She’s active, but has not yet fully grasped the concept of the replacement for mama in the form of the syringe with the soft baby-animal nipple slipped onto the needle mount. She keeps trying to bite the nipple off. I’ll make a better lash-up in a little while, and see if she’s more willing with that. She’s also infested with fleas, much worse than one this young ought to be, and I’ve dusted her with diatomaceous earth as an initial control method. She’s way too tiny for any of the packaged doses of topical flea stuff, and trying to titrate the dose down enough to be safe is really dicey, so I just have to work with what is known safe.
@werehatrack
Skip the nipple. Just syringe into her mouth a little bit at a time. That is what I had to do. I held mine on her back angled her body up with her head cradled in several fingers (to control it) and had to very gently pry her mouth open initially, sticking the syringe end in (works better at the side of her mouth and not in the center) until she tasted it and got the hang of it. Mine never did figure out how to use a nipple. Would just bite it and not suck. Even when I made the hole a lot bigger. Might try making the hole bigger.
Fleas. Warm water in the sink and dunk her. Keep water out of her ears and off her face. The fleas will climb to her head. Brush them off or flea comb them off. Water may well end up blood colored (did with mine). Likely you will need to hold her by the nape of her neck to keep her underwater and relatively still except for her face. It takes 5-10 seconds for a flea to drown. your goal is to drown them. I held mine more or less on her back with her head above water, the rest of her body under. Easier to keep her from inhaling water that way. The reflex to curl up/hold still when gripped by the nap of the neck will help.
Then take a warmed towel (hair dryer can do that), wrap her in that rubbing her dry, switching to dry warm towels. May have to do that several days in a row, several times a day. Don’t give her the stuffed animal until you have her defleaed or you will have baby fleas living on that.
@werehatrack PS fleas only spend a short period of time on the cat’s body and most of the time off them. Make sure you give her clean towels, fleece bits after each time you clean her. If you start finding fleas in the house vacuum over and over and immediately dump the dust outside (or you will just get them climbing out of the vacuum - same when you suck fruit flies out of the air - don’t ask me how I know that LOL). The vibrations encourage the eggs to hatch so you can get rid of them faster which helps get rid of everything faster.
Also she needs to feel like she is sleeping by you. Not safe to have her in the bed in case you roll over on her - that is why the box so if she cries you can talk to her and put a hand in there petting her. If you get very lucky one of your other cats may decide their job is to mother her. That will solve the keep her warm problem. You may then have they where did they park her problem to then feed her. The box is easier for that.
@Kidsandliz So far, all of the others are actively disinterested in this noisy little furball. But I think I got enough KMR into her on the first session, because she’s happily asleep in the box now. (It’s actually a cat carrier sitting on its end with a bedpad in the bottom. I have a bunch of rags I can cycle through as bedding to help with the deflea project.)
@Kidsandliz Thirty years ago, for just one night, we had a seven-day-old orange kitten that would only sleep on my hand. I moved into what was then the guest bedroom, propped myself up on some pillows, and carefully snoozed with the kitten all night.
@Kidsandliz @werehatrack When I was given young flea infested kittens the vet told my to bathe them with Palmolive dish detergent. It does kill the adult fleas quick but I’m not sure if your kitty is too young. Definitely put Palmolive and water in the bowl to dip the comb into so the fleas don’t get away.
Thanks for being so kindhearted to the poor baby.
@werehatrack She is going to need something warm in there with her or she will die of hypothermia. That is one of the big reasons why babies being raised by humans die. She can’t regulate her own body heat well and can’t generate enough heat on her own. If nothing else put a human heating pad on low in there with enough towels on top of it that it is only 101 degrees (a cat normal temp is around 101 or so) on the surface when you press the thermometer into the towel. Or since you have to feed her every couple of hours use the water bottle heat method (again watch the temp).
If it is more than you want to handle call the no kill shelters and whomever is stocking Petsmart and Petco and any other stores with cats (all of these places the cats are not “owned” by the store, rather by shelters who also take care of them. If there isn’t a phone number on the tag at the cages ask the manager), tell them you have a 10 day old kitten that needs a foster. Usually these places have people who foster babies who need bottle fed.
Fleas can be gotten rid of by flea combing daily and killing the fleas in soapy water. If the infestation is bad the kitten can be bathed in dawn dishwashing soap. NO flea medicated soaps yet! Wash bedding in hot and dry on high to kill the flea eggs and juveniles. A bad flea infestation can actually kill very small kittens so it is nothing to sneeze at.
@BelleGunness A really bad flea infestation can kill an adult, too. But there, it’s easier to stop. A tab of capstar, a bath, topical flea meds, nuke the bedding with metaphorical fire; problem can be solved. This poor little thing had flea dirt all over, down in her fur, so the first step was the dusting (because she was already stressed), and now that she has figured out the food situation (yay! She emptied a 6cc syringe by herself!) I will probably do the bath a little later. Right now, she’s curled up in fresh towels, in the back end of a carrier positioned in the exhaust of the fridge (nice, gentle warm air.) Assuming all goes well, I hope to have her terrorizing the rest of the bunch in a couple of weeks, and stealing their gooshy along about Halloween. And then I need to find a foster for her, in an adoption program that does decent vetting. I think she’s going to be a good one. (I think this is a “she”, anyway; at this age, hard to be sure.)
@werehatrack
Good idea about the fridge exhaust for heat.
I volunteer in shelters. You’d be more likely to find a shelter (eg no kill) if you start calling around now telling them you can foster at no cost to them until she is old enough to adopt rather than start when she is of that age where she is ready. Shelters are generally full to overflowing. There are still a ton of kittens being born now. The odds are high you will be turned away repeatedly. Some people abandon the kittens then in a cardboard box with air holes shortly before the shelter opens. That decreases the odds they will accept yours.
The places that sell kittens through pet shops have the problem of fostering them until there is a cage open. That’s you’d foster helps. At least the ones around here (I cleaned cages for one of them) does screen families and do turn people down.
@Kidsandliz I have the names of several of those, but their level of usefulness varied in the past. I guess it’s time to make the phone calls again. At least this little one is showing signs of being a potential winner. And OMG can she purr! I have never seen one this young rattle this loud!
@werehatrack Starting telling the story of this cat on the social media platform nextdoor. You’ll get cat lovers invested they story and one may decide to adopt her as they feel connected to her. There you can click on their names and see what main threads they have started in the past to get a sense of them. You can also search on them to see what they have posted in the past. If she is all black it will be harder to find her a home (too much superstition) and don’t even think about finding her a home until well past halloween (many shelters around here won’t adopt out black cats from the end of Sept to the middle of Nov).
@Kidsandliz Solid black, and that’s part of why I wasn’t initially planning to look for a placement until after the date. OTOH, the upward blip in demand for black kittens as genuine pets has not completely subsided here yet; it hit hard when Black Panther came out, and there’s still some lingering positive vibe from it. That didn’t happen everywhere, from what I heard.
@Kidsandliz @werehatrack I only have four gorgeous black ones… but October may not not be the best time to hand one over. For… reasons.
The hair getting stuck in my beard/all over my sheets/floors is not them. Now the 5 gray poofballs…
Hope she makes it/good on you.
Kitten update: This morning, she greedily pulled in 11cc of KMR in one go, and then basically went back to sleep. She’s going to become a lap pest real soon now, this is obvious.
@werehatrack
Well kitty mommy - Baby kitties sleep on or up against their mommies…
Welcome young Jedi. We expect great things
@unksol Pretty kitty.
Which one is that, again?
@Kyeh Alex. He’s probably responsible for one of the secondary sets. He’s a big boy. Hard to tell except for the dent he’s putting in the pillow. Black cats are good cats
@unksol Yeah, I had one who was very sweet.
Kitten has had another bath, and is much closer to actually being clean now; I think this round got most of the remaining fleas. (There were a lot of them initially.) The kitten clearly was very happy to sit inside the towel swaddle and get attention while her fur dried. (She’s still much too small to either allow to air dry uninsulated or to try to refluff with a blow-dryer.)
Oh, and she’s teething.
@werehatrack And this morning, she has developed a more expressive voice, and she’s perceptibly stronger. And did I mention that she’s teething? All good signs. Today, she gets to ride with me to Killeen so that I can empty the T-shirts out of my minivan.
The kitten, having been given an interim designation of “fuzzy bean”, is currently engaged in exploring my feet and their immediate environs. She’s still tiny, but expanding. Still teething, but more so. I am starting to understand why many feral momcats tend to cut the kids loose around 10 weeks, sometimes sooner.