Roughly how much does it cost to maintain a kitten?

Factual Questions
1

My hunny is very very very much about getting a kitten. She was discussing her strong, present desire to get a kitten tonight with her mother. Toward the end she started crying. Then she went upstairs and was … well, crying harder.

So now I see that it isn’t some flight of fancy for her, and I have a more serious question to that end:

How much did your cat/kitten cost you the first year? I’m trying to figure out right now if we can do it financially (hunny swears she can wear down her mommy. I am not so sure. I told her we could move out next month and get a kitten, but I am not so sure either about how our finances will survive that rather sharp jolt). If we can’t right now, she will be unhappy (which will hurt me and make me unhappy, but that’s another matter). It just pains me to see sad tears running down her face(yes, as opposed to happy tears:)).

2

Well, there’s stuff here:

3

Well… You don’t need a kennel for a cat. Also you don’t really need a cat bed. If you get one, the cat will probably ignore it and sleep on your sweater or your chair or your bed. Probably don’t need a collar or leash either.

The real commitment is the food and the vet bills, especially the spay/neuter costs. The costs listed in the previous post are reasonable. When you first get the kitten, you must also go to a vet to have it tested for possible diseases such as feline leukemia and feline immune deficiency. You may be able to get an agreement from the person you get the cat from that if it is positive for either of those that they will take it back, unless you are one of those saintly persons who would be willing to take the doomed kitten and nurse it along until its inevitable early passing. And of course in that case you must not add another cat to the household since both diseases are quite communicable to other cats (although not at all to humans).

Sometimes animal rescue groups have deals where your donation offsets the spay/neuter costs at a vet they have a deal with.

Do NOT go to one of those pet stores in the mall. Chances are excellent that they are getting the animals from places you do not want to encourage. Animal rescue groups are great since they assure that you will have a kitten that is fully weaned and housebroken and is as far as they can tell free of obvious diseases and parasites. Also they often have been kept in someone’s home until they are ready for adoption, so you will have someone to ask about the little one’s personality.

Of course the very best option is if you have a friend whose indoor mama cat has had kittens and you can see the nice clean healthy environment where the kitten has lived, and see that the mama is healthy also. In that case you’ll probably get the kitten for free, too.

4

You will also need a cat carrier. Most rental places, if they allow pets at all, will charge a steep pet deposit. Sometimes this is refundable, more often it is not. Cats don’t need kennels.

I believe that my cat cost me about $250 the first year, BUT I already had cat toys, litter box, etc. as we already had one cat.

Cats do better in pairs. I would advise getting two cats, rather than just one, if you’re going to get a cat/kitten at all.

However, considering your age and circumstances, I would say (and I’m not an expert in this, just from my experience) that your budget would probably be quite stressed from a kitten, or from a baby.

Does your sweetie like human babies at all? Can she perhaps offer babysitting services? She might be having a surge of maternal feelings which babysitting would help quell.

5

[ul]:rolleyes: [sup]You do know that kittens grow up to be cats, right?[/sup][/ul]

6

I was thinking, when she first brought this up, that it was some maternal instinct kicking in, except that:

  1. She doesn’t want kids for a few more years.
  2. She’s wanted a kitten since her cat died about a year ago.
  3. She has two nieces (one I think is 8, the other I believe is 6) who visit decently often, and she tutors at a local elementary school. If, after all that, she still has some mothering instinct unchecked, I think one kitten wouldn’t quite do it:D

She is also still in this childlike innocence mode. When I ask her what she will feel like if her dog (10-year-old dalmation) accidentally kills her kitty, or ir falls from the stairs (she swears she will make this impossible, but I am not ignorant of the abilities of cats to jump roughly fifty thousand times their height), she simply says “I won’t let it.” She either honestly thinks she can give her kitty a Perfect Life [sup]TM[/sup], or she is deluded. Either way I would like to know, before we go ahead and get a kitten, that she is aware that as Perfect a Kitty Owner as she may think she can be, even Perfect People Make Mistakes.

Don’t quite see the point of the smiley, but I am aware, as she is, that kittens grow up to be cats. I was not quite that sheltered in my youth as to believe that kittens stayed that way forever.

7

One thing you’ll need plenty of if you want to have a kitten: Time at Home. You never know what kind of trouble the thing can get into so you might need to monitor it for a while. I mean, a WHILE.

So if you guys are thinking about getting jobs to support yourselves and the pets, and there isn’t really going to be anyone at home, I wouldn’t recommend it.

8

Most of the early costs are negligible. If you adopt a cat in a no-kill city (such as San Francisco), the spay/neutering and shots are reduced drastically to make adoption more appealing and affordable. Check your local policies as well as those of the communities around you. Cats are cats; you don’t need a mall cat or pet store cat. My last cat came from a no-kill shelter. She cost twenty dollars and came with a spay certificate, good when she reached spaying age. The spay cost twenty dollars at a local clinic.
She came with all the required shots and I now I take her to a clinic when each is due, usually once a year.

You need bowls, food, litter, litter box, treats, a few toys. scratching post or similar. You can buy a heavy cardboard cat carrier for under ten dollars at most vet’s offices. Cats sleep wherever they want and don’t require (or frequently use) purchased bedding.

There have been threads devoted to indoor/outdoor cats with pros and cons. My cats have all been indoor cats, ensuring long lives and less frequent vet bills. Use your own judgement.

I feed them only dry food - their poops are never messy, they get all the necessary vitamins, dry food doesn’t get rank as wet food often does, it’s better for their teeth, you can leave two days’ worth out if you go away for the weekend and will find that the cat will survive nicely. Dry food runs about ten bucks a month.

The real cost is damage that they can do when they decide to claw (shred) the drapes and upholstery. A scratching post works somewhat but isn’t the final answer - in my case vigilance worked somewhat and some of the sprays work as well. It’s just a phase the you have to live through. Think of the cat as a toddler and adjust accordingly.

Check with local vet’s offices for ‘old lady’ cat adverts. There are elderly people who move into assisted living or similar facilities who must part with their pets. The cats are usually well-cared for and have worried owners. Your hunny sounds like a great candidate for an older cat.

Good luck to you!

9

Not much really.

  1. Don’t buy the kitten, there are always free kittens in the local paper, well at least there are in this country.

  2. The companies that test the cat flu injections only guarantee them for a year, but in fact they last longer. It’s a big scam by vets to make you pay every year for an injection, in fact you only need one in the 1st year and the cat should be ok for the rest of it’s life. £20

  3. Got to have it chopped so you don’t get more kittens (if female) or it goes missing for weeks at a time and pisses over your furniture (if male) cost £20 for male £80 for female.

  4. Food costs me about £10 a week.

  5. Flee powder or drops about every 3 months £15

  6. Litter tray, because you have to keep them in until they are about 6 months old, cost £5 for the tray, the big sacks of litter cost about £10 but last about a month.

All the rest is really unnecessary. Basket, blankets etc don’t bother, cats sleep anywhere and much prefer the dark corner behind the sofa or something. Toys, don’t bother, the kitten won’t even look at them and will be far happier playing with the curtains or even a cork tied to a bit of string. Cat carriers, are a cardboard box with some holes punched in it tied with string.

Total cost for the first year about £700 if you don’t go silly and buy fluffy toys and all that rubbish. So just over $1000 is my estimation.

10

$1000 a year? Whoa. My two full-grown cats don’t cost that much. I would say, including vet bills and hideously expensive Science Diet, only about $500 a year for both.

11

Many shelters around here won’t even adopt out a single kitten - if you only want one, you have to get an adult cat. Whether or not your local shelter has this policy, I strongly advise you to get two. One kitten gets into a lot more trouble than two (who can play with each other). A single kitten gets lonely and goes exploring for trouble.

Protecting the kitten from the dog is extremely important - you must have a way to lock them away from one another when you are not home, at least until the kitten is big enough to defend itself (maybe eight months or so?).

Another thing to take into account is emergency costs. Each cat has had one $500 emergency vet bill since we got the two of them a year ago. If you’re not able to absorb an occasional emergency X-ray or whatever, you might want to think twice.

If she just needs a kitten fix, maybe she can volunteer at an area shelter? (Although if she’s softhearted, you might end up with a whole passel of cats that way).

You can get a lot of really good specific information on all this stuff at cats.about.com - the people in the forums are really nice.

12

I think the cost of pets is actually dependent on the quality of care you give them. It’s not very expensive to get a free kitten from the paper, feed it the lower quality food from a discount store, and use the cheap litter. Vet visits? Well, I know many people who have animals that have never been to see a vet.

However, I don’t think that is the proper way to care for a pet. We adopted two kittens from a shelter back in December. They were already spayed/neutered and came with their first vet check-up free, so we were only out the $75 for the adoption fee plus the $100 or so for supplies.

On a monthly basis… Food $16 for 8 lb bag of Nutro, $15 for 2 containers of litter, $25 for Advantage (flea control), $3 for kitty treats, and probably about $5-10 on new toys. They only have to go to the vet once a year to get their vaccines, which is about $75-100 for both.

Honestly though…they could cost 10 times what they do and I would never complain. It brightens up my day every time I walk in the door and see them. On my days off, they are always curled up with me watching TV or trying to lay on my book when I am reading. I can’t imagine not having them now. They are by far the best Christmas present I’ve ever received.

13

Do watch out, though, when you have had a cat for a number of years and it comes time to pony up. Cats get old, and likely, when the cat is old is when you will be most attached to it. That is when the vet bills really kick in.

My two Siamese are about 8 years old, but one of them is permanently neurotic and must take kitty Prozac and the other suffered kidney failure due to a period of being left at the Vet (!)

Although the kidney failure cat (Sqiji) is okay now, it cost a fortune to have him treated at the time. Now, of necessity, both cats must eat a special diet (KD) which costs about $80 CDN/month.

One very important tip to keeping vet bills down and having your cat live a long life: keep him indoors. And indoor cat is a happy cat. And, of course, have him spayed.

Whoops, I mean neutered.:stuck_out_tongue:

14

And=an

15

My costs:

Four cats: Free (pregnant stray wandered up one day)
Shots per year: $37 average per year per cat (average becuase rabies is every year by state statute, all others are every three years)
One neuter: $40
Three spays: $195 total
Weekly food costs: $6.00
Monthly kitty litter costs: $15.00

Carrier costs can vary widely, and I can’t include them becuase I’ve had three of them for years and one of them I got for free for buying a certain amount of kitty litter. My 23-pounder is too big to comfortably be toted in a carrier so for him I have a harness and leash which cost about $12.00. And of course kitty litter pans are necessary and don’t last forever, but they can be gotten for less than $20, and are often less than $10. I have to buy the big ones, which cost more, because of my 23-pounder.

Incidently, all four of mine enjoy their purchased beds and toys, but of course these aren’t necessary.

The big financial risk comes if a cat becomes ill or injured. I have so far spent close to $300.00 on Peaches’s bladder infection. Part of the high cost was the initial trip to the emergency vet, but that’s the thing about cats. They are quite prone to kidney disease and one of the contributing factors is a UTI and the possible blockages they cause. Peaches appeared to be blocked and I knew if she indeed was she could be dead before the regular vet opened. Fortunately, she wasn’t blocked, just straining terribly to rid her self of that offending bladder! But still, she picked up a resistant bug so it’s been multiple meds and multiple vet visits, and we’re still not done, and it may mean special food for the rest of her life, which will increase my weekly food budget.

And, like Lynn Bodoni previously mentioned, when you rent you are drastically limited as to where you will be welcomed, and be prepared to pay more. In my building, the non-refundable pet “deposit” is $500 each pet and the rent is increased by $20 per month per pet. Thank God I was grandfathered, my costs are nil. In fact, I have been quite lucky in that I was always able to find a landlord that adored kitties as much as me, but the key word there is lucky. That is not the norm!

And now to my final expense: A new couch slip cover every few years: $50-120, depending on if I can find a good sale. Necessary because I refuse to declaw. But then, that’s the choice I make!

You also have to understand that some cats barf alot, and they really don’t care if they happen to be perched atop your very expensive collections of electronics at the time, or your silk blouse that you lay across the back of the chair for a moment. Some of them never quite get the hang of what the litter box is for, either, despite your best efforts to determine why not, and they really don’t care how expensive those leather shoes are that they’re p*ssing on.

These are all worst-case scenarios. But you must know all this before you adopt so as to prevent the “revolving door” that shelters have become because too many people did not do their homework before adopting. I think that may have been the reasoning behind kniz*'s post since one of the most-mentioned reasons for animal surrender is it grew up, or it’s not cute anymore or similar moronic “reasons”.

One last thing - if you do get kittens, please don’t think you’re saving money by buying the cheap foods. I actually save money by buying premium food. Since it has less “filler” and more real food, they eat far less, so in real costs I save money over the cheap grocery store brands. Furthermore, they poop less and when they do poop it stinks less, so therefore I change litter less often, saving money. Lastly, they are prone to fewer expensive illnesses when they are fed premium quality food. Peaches apparently being the possible exception to that rule.

16

Sometimes you can eliminate, or at least minimize the damage from scratching on furniture, but you have to be around a lot and very vigilant. First, be sure there is a good, fun, sturdy scratching post. Second, buy a water pistol. Every time kitty scratches on the post, praise profusely, possibly reward with a treat. Every time kitty scratches on the furniture, squirt with the water gun. Since the water comes from a distance, the cat doesn’t associate it with you. They just know they get wet when they do that. But it has to be consistent; if you’re away all day this won’t do the trick.

Two cats are great and it’s true they will amuse each other, and keep each other company when you’re away, especially if they are from the same litter. We got 2 unrelated cats at the same time from a rescue center. Both were wonderful heathly and friendly to us, but they never became friends. Didn’t play together, sleep together, ever.

17

If you and your hunny are not living in your own abode yet, and you this is because you cannot afford to do so, rather than a personal or cultural choice, no new pets. That’s just good common sense. These “Just won’t” arguments are another red flag.

When you are settled and financial ready, what about a grown cat? You can get them, you know, from many shelters. There are groups in many major cities that place the adult cats “orphans” of owners who died of AIDS or other illnesses.

Cost-wise, a carrier is a must, and the pet must be comfortable in it. Although cat’s don’t need crate-training as a dog does, you do need to be able to easily and calmly carry the cat to the vet, or take it with you if there is an earthquake or a hurricane and you have to evacuate.

Mini-rant: There is no such thing as a no-kill shelter, or a no-kill city. Truly mind-boggling numbers of cats and dogs and puppies and kittens are put down every single day. No-kill means “we let other people do that.” Usually, the county animal control facility does the dirty work for all the no-kill shelters in the area, either because the “no-kill” actually brings them in, or because when the “no-kill” places are full, animals are dumped or taken to shelters with more pragmatic policies. Okay. End of rant.

18

[not really a hijack since it’s still on the subject of pet expenses and why you have to plan for everything]

MLS, sadly, pet supply makers do not seem to realize there are cats as big as dogs. My 23 pounder, the one so big I can’t carry him, has been leashed trained. Only thing is, I have to buy a dog harness for him, and put it on him backwards since cats don’t have the same tiny waist that dogs do. Similarly, the scratching posts are jokes. When my cat stretches out he is over a yard long, and no one makes posts that tall. Furthermore, it would have to either have a huge base or be extremely bottom-heavy to go against his 23 pounds. I have tried one of those that lay flat, and while the girl cats love it, and it suits their purposes perfectly, Big Mac is the kind that likes to stretch up to do his scratching. Unfortunately, because of my small apartment and somewhat limited budget, I can’t take advantage of one of those floor-to-ceiling trees that would probably solve the problem of “where is Big gonna scratch?” Add the fact that I am at work and my son is at school all day, and it’s easy to see why I have resigned myself to a shredded couch. But I’m not complaining, I love my Biggie more than the couch!

j.c. you are right. The reason the no-kills are able to stay no-kills is they only accept animals that they feel have a good chance of being adopted in a relatively short time. However, I don’t begrudge them that becuase they do give the adoptable ones a fighting chance, whereas if they were in a city shelter they would be euathanized in three days, regardless. There’s room for both types of shelters in a community, in my opinion.

Of course, the real answer is spay and neuter. Although I think tremendous strides have been made in educating the public about the necessity of animal population control, sadly, it is a problem that will never be eradicated with so many bubbas and bubbettes still out there letting their animals roam intact.

[/not really a hijack since it’s still on the subject of pet expenses and why you have to plan for everything]

19

How much your kitten costs per year depends on how much you want to spend on it … some cats are quite happy to eat the scraps you leave after dinner, others turn their nose up at everything bar the best quality steak or salmon. Spaying or neutering is a must [my friend runs an animal shelter and gets all the animals spayed or neutered before re-homing them - but you have to pay a donation to adpot a pet], you can buy an expensive bed, but cats sleep anywhere that’s warm, [they will probably sleep on your bed], toys can be bought or make your own from whatever you have to hand - string, wool, ping pong balls, your hair [my 4ft long pigtale used to provide hours of fun for my pal’s cats]. Be prepared to be scratched every now and again, and even if you have a litter tray they may pee and poo other places [my pal’s cats used her house plant-pots, a cat we used to have used to sit over the drain in the bath to pee]. Injuries caused by fights with other cats, dogs and cars can be costly, in which case you may want to keep your cat indoors permanently, which will involve growing a square of grass for the cat to chew on as necessary.

Oh and always remember, you don’t own your cat, they own you.

20

Since Patrick posted this last night two kittens have come to live with us!

I found them today abanonded at a dumpster in town, very loney and very hungry. It took some convincing but mom let me bring them with me under the condition that I find another home for one of them. I went to the Dollar Store to get some supplies for now until I can get out and get them more things. A bag of Meow Mix, a litter box, Arm & Hammer Scoop Away litter and a litter scooper (which is nothing more than cooking spoon). That just ran me about 12 dollars. I plan on taking mine to the vet as soon as I can. Hopefully by Monday or Tuesday and I’ll make another trip out to find some better kitty food and some more litter.

I brought them in and gave them some food and water and they acted like that hadn’t eaten or had anything to drink in a week. I filled their litter box but they’ve yet to use it and I introduced them to the Really Huge Dog. Dixie got in the face of the black kitty and it wasn’t too friendly to her but I think that is the kitty I plan on giving up. Dixie completely ignored the other one and it kinda just mewed a little but didn’t attempted to dig any claws into me when it saw the doggie.

I would really like to keep both kitties but I think that’s more or less out of the question. I’m just very happy that I’ve got one to call my own again.:slight_smile:

And thus ends the kitty adventure for the day.