found a very young kitten in a construction site. Guessing 3 weeks. Eyes are open and cat is fully furred. keeps licking like it wants milk. very active now that I’ve got it home and have it locked in bathroom (yes I removed all articles and cleaned it). I found if I toss it under some sheets it goes right to sleep. Purrs like a miniature Indy 500 car.
Is there such a thing as cat formula I can use with an eye dropper and when will it eat dry food. I will take it to a mobile vet tomorrow but it seems very healthy.
need answer fast. Don’t want to listen to 8 hrs of mewing and don’t want to leave cat in bathroom.
Proper care guidelines. Note particularly the warning on cow’s milk, formula suggestions and the importance of keeping very young kittens warm so they can digest properly. Good luck :).
PetSmart and PetCo should have kitten formula. I hear even Walmart carries it. Grab a small litter box and some litter while you’re there and you’re golden.
I sincerely hope you can manage to save the poor kitten, but remember: unless you know for certain that its’ mother is dead or disabled, it’s almost always better to leave the kitten in her care, and feed *her *instead. Generally, you shouldn’t take on a kitten before 12 weeks age.
Go to the pet store and get something called KMR- Kitten Milk Replacement. Ask them what device to use to feed the kiten–they probably have some kind of bottle. I used that with a week-old kitten found about 3.5 years ago. (ETA: were were positive her mother and sibs were gone.) She LOVED being fed-- I must have used some kind of baby bottle (more like a doll-sized bottle), but I don’t remember. I DO remember picking her up at feeding time and her reaching out her tiny paws for the bottle. I used to sing to her while I fed her-- “Me and My Shadow,” as she was all black. Today she is a sleek, gorgeous beauty! I still sing that song to her. Good luck!
Any pet store will have KMR and bottles appropriate for kittens. You might even be able to get them at some grocery stores. Don’t use cow’s milk or human baby formula unless you have no other alternative.
You also need to stimulate (i.e. wipe) the kitten’s rear end to get it to go to the bathroom, and do this after every feeding. Keep the kitten in a box with sides high enough that it can’t climb out, with plenty of towels or other padding.
Three weeks may also be old enough to offer it some canned food. Ask the vet.
Cite for this please!
A close friend of mine took on a feral cat, which had been a scourge of the neighboring chicken-farms and a fright to all cats and dogs in the neighborhood, and which they all wanted killed or caught. It took her only a few months to transform this ferocious critter into a friendly, tame house-cat!
Research shows that the socialization stage in kittens is 3 - 9 weeks old, with them becoming progressively harder to tame with every day over about 8 weeks. While kittens up to the age of 12 weeks can be tamed, older kittens often retain a degree of fearfulness and a small percentage of kittens (approx 10%) will not tame at all. There is no magical age at which kittens become untameable. From here.
There are always outliers of course. One of the regular posters on this board I believe had a situation with one unusually friendly feral kitten in a litter which either tamed instantly or was just naturally fully tame. But typically post-start-of-weaning-process ( ~4 weeks ) to 7-8 weeks is considered optimal for taming truly feral kittens. Usually at that age it is easy enough to do. After 12 weeks it becomes much harder on average, after 16 exponentially more difficult again.
Update. took the cat to a mobile vet Sunday and it turns out she is actually a he. And 3 weeks is actually 6 weeks. He’s been wormed and flea protected and weighs 1 lb. Vet said he is very healthy.
He cried something fierce the first day. Cried like hell on the way to the Vet the next day and then fell asleep on the way home. Gave him formula for the first 3 feedings and he was so aggressive I thought he would eat the cap off the bottle. There was no sucking at all. He’s quite insistent when hungry and bites fairly hard to drive home the point.
In the space of 24 hrs he went from formula to mixed soft/hard cat food and he’s already litter trained and cage trained. Came home from work today to a cage with no food, a full litter box, and a kitten ready for food and frolic. Played with him for 90 minutes solid and tossed him back in the cage so I could eat. Nodded right off.
Thank you so much for rescuing the kitten. There are so many people who would have just walked on by, you are a good person and hopefully you will have many years of love to come.
If you found him at a construction site, I think you should name him Makita with a nickname of Mack. Or, maybe DeWalt and you can call him Dewey for short.
I wish I had thought of Makita and DeWalt. I have two boys (brothers) rescued from an industrial site. They are called CPE and JC (I’m a classical music fan).
The socialisation cite may go back to Desmond Morris (he of Peoplewatching fame.) His book Catwatching makes something close to this assertion. He goes further to suggest that you need five different people to interact with kittens before a critical age to ensure they are fully socialised, and will be happy with any random person approaching them. Otherwise they tend to stay very nervous with strangers (or even anyone other than their initial rearer)
