My husband and I are well known among friends, family, and cow-orkers as animal lovers. I have cared for many orphaned animals, but never kittens. The teenage son of a woman who works with my husband found three young kittens under some equipment in the rain at the construction site where he works. He had already had them for 24 hours before he decided it was too much work to care for them himself, so it was too late to try to find out if the mother truly was gone or just out looking for food by the time we were involved. So now we have threekittenfosters.
As I said, I have fostered many species, including puppies, rabbits, squirrels, and raccoons. So I have done some species related research as well as applying my previous knowledge. These kittens appear to be about 3 weeks old (their ears are open, but not fully upright, they crawl, but don’t truly walk, they have teeth breaking through, theyplay fight). The thing that surprises me is that they don’t seem to be able to eliminate on their own. Most other mammal babies can do so by the time they are two weeks old, around the same time the eyes open. But everyone seems to be doing well regardless. They are eating and eliminating in healthy ways. Based on the charts I have seen, they actually weigh enough to be 5 weeks old (between 13 and 16 ounces), but that can’t be. I think the kid who had them before us just fed them too much.
I have two girls and a boy. While they aren’t too unusually marked, the girls being tabby calicos and the boy a gray tabby, the one has really neat almost bengal kitten looking markings.
We already have dogs and two elderly cats, so I doubt we will keep any. We will get the kittens their shots and get them fixed, then rehome them. My son is dying to keep the boy. I would like to keep the leopard one. We’ll see how it goes, if we can convince my husband that one more isn’t going to make much difference.
I am assuming being feral that they will be short hair, but they are awfully fluffy - they have really long guard hairs. Does anyone have experience with young kittens to know a short hair from a long hair at this early age? In puppies, you can usually tell by two weeks old…
That is tempting. I didn’t know anything could be worse than baby raccoons as far as making a racket… the kittens recognize people as their source of food now, so they mewl something terrible when we come in the room. Seeing that I have two hands and three kittens, I can’t feed them all at once, and the one who isn’t being fed is generally trying to get into trouble while mewling, like climbing my shirt or heading for the edge of the bed. We take turns with their feedings - we both feed them together only once per day.
For as agile as they are, I am still boggled that they can’t eliminate on their own. It is fun to compare the different development… puppies toddle when they first learn to walk - more like humans in that they take a few steps at normal speed then fall down. The kittens move slowly and keep their bellies low to avoid falling down instead of toddling. They climb better than they walk right now, although one climbed her way out of the box this morning and did a very amusing fast high crawl, low walk to follow me down the hallway. (mewling the whole way, of course)
I have to try to get a video of it… when the boy eats, he wiggles his ears in time to his suckling. Too adorable!
How do you ork a cow? I take it cows like getting orked?
Seriously, tho, handraising kittens is hard but also sweet. We have two now that we took at 2 1/2 weeks and are ready for adoption presently. The youngest we’ve started with is 3 days old. There’s nothing cuter than a suckling kitten, with their little ears pumping back and forth.
Cute idea! We have been listening to the Kim Harrison “The Hollows” book series as a family, so they are already named Rachel, Ivy, and Kisten after the three main characters of those books. Kisten was almost Jenks, but he seems more of a cool dude than a clown, so we went with Kisten. (Kisten is a vampire, Jenks is a pixie)
::I must stipulate that I am posting this from beyond the grave because I am DED FROM CUTE::
So if they aren’t eliminating on their own are you having to do the warm moist washcloth wipey thing on their little buttholes to make them go or what?
I had tried to reply yesterday, but the board was having trouble. Yes, we are stimulating them by wiping both openings at that end. They only poop once every 24 hours. They do the otehr a lot! I can’t believe how much fluid such tiny bodies can hold!
