Thank you for that info, I think today we start the litter boxes and some
strained turkey or chicken. They are eating up to 30cc a meal...and sleeping
through the night- Thank God. Anyway they have started to have greenish brown
liquid diarrhea. Anyone know what this is from, I ran a fecal at work and they
were neg for parasites (I know they're not shed in every BM so I'll be running
more) but in the meantime should I be concerned about the diarrhea. They're
well hydrated and have no URI symptoms, normal temp etc. At first I just
thought it was a kittne thing, kinda like human babies not being well formed,
but I read something online which got me a little nervous. Thank you again
Kristi
Yes, I am taking lots of pics, I'll try to figure out how to post them. We
named the boys: Syms, Sebastian, and Sampson.
>
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Date: 2005/03/06 Sun AM 12:31:15 EST
> To: felvtalk@felineleukemia.org
> Subject: Re: raising kittens???
>
> Hi Kristi
>
> That's wonderful that they were negative!
>
> I've bottle reared a lot of orphans. I'm assuming that a lot of this you
> already know, being a tech, but I'm giving a lot of info on formulas and
> such
> for lurkers or folks who may not have raised orphans before because kitten
> season is just around the corner.
>
> Generally, they'll start using a litter pan at 2-3 weeks (shoe box lids or
> foil brownie or biscuit pans work really well) and when they're starting to
> lick your fingers, you can try giving them formula out of a dish. When they
> get the hang of drinking out of something other than a bottle (be patient,
> it
> can take a while for them to figure it out), then you can start adding
> strained chicken baby food (make sure there are no onions in it - chicken or
> turkey
> are the easiest to digest), and rice, oatmeal, or mixed baby cereal. Start
> off with it being a very thin gruel - mostly milk replacer and meat, and
> then
> use the cereal to thicken it. When they've been eating that for a week or
> so, then you can use either softened dry kitten food (I used Purina kitten
> chow
> because it softened in water the fastest) or canned kitten food. The dry
> worked well with kittens with diarrhea from the food change and also
> switching
> from milk replacer to powdered dry milk (for people - which is fat free)
> helps with runnybutts. Science diet feline growth (it may be called
> "kitten"
> formula now) canned worked the best with the kittens I raised. Iams kitten
> canned was too pasty unless I mixed strained chicken baby food with it, the
> science diet was dry enough to crumble into bite sized pieces easily.
>
> I usually started with the baby food and cereal at about 3-4 weeks, switched
> from milk replacer to powdered dry milk at about 5-6 weeks (because that's
> when they started to become lactose intolerant), and had them off the bottle
> completely at 8-10 weeks - or when they started biting nipples in half or
> pulling them out of the bottle. Even when they were eating out of a dish
> and I
> had them weaned to food with no milk in it, I still gave them a morning and
> bedtime (my bedtime) bottle to make sure they were getting enough to eat -
> their mom's would nurse them until they were about 12 weeks, but after 8
> weeks,
> it's more for bonding than nourishment - according to all the books. I've
> found that the extra bottles, or at least the act of giving them an extra
> "easy"
> meal without all the solids in their other food really helped them to grow
> better. The ones who stopped getting a bottle as soon as they were eating
> out
> of a dish and getting more in their stomachs than on their faces and feet
> grew at a about a 1/4 pound a week (1 pound a month - roughly the same rate
> as
> if they were with their moms still), and if I didn't, they grew at something
> more like 1/4-1/2 a pound a month (12 week olds were often still the size of
> a mother raised 6 - 8 week old).
>
> Regardless of how fast they grew, they were still not neurologically
> developed enough to know they "had to go" in time to get to the pan if there
> was
> only one pan in the room or to get to one of a couple pans in the house
> until
> they were 8 weeks old. Until then, I kept a kitten sized pan under every
> end
> table and under the low shelves of my aquarium stands. Basically, I had at
> least one pan in each corner of every room the kittens had access to.
>
> Have fun with the babies! Yours are getting to the cutest age - starting to
> run and falling over every couple steps, bouncing more than walking... makes
> me want to raise a litter myself!
>
> Where there's Life, there's Hope
>
>
> Kathy
>
> "There is nothing so strong as gentleness, and there is nothing so gentle as
> real strength." ~ Sir Francis de Sates
>
>
>
