How are the kittens doing? Has their diarrhea cleared up? Nina
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
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: [email protected] 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
