Help with caring for newborn kitten

"elocs" wrote in message
...

This is almost exactly how I found my first cat back in October of 1975.
I was waiting at a friend's house, waiting for him to get there, and
when he arrived he said he saw a small kitten alongside the street near
the Mississippi River bridge. He did not pick it up because he said his
tom cat would kill it. I went to check it out and it had probably been
15 or 20 minutes since he had seen it. It was very small, fit in the
palm of my hand, and its eyes were not open. I did not know what to do,
so I took it to the vet. He thought the kitten was maybe 3 days old and
it was covered with fleas. He used flea spray on his hands to cover the
kitten's body. Then I took it home with his recommendations.

snipped
She lived just a few months short of 20 years and I used what I
learned from raising her from a near newborn on other baby animals with
great results. So it can work out great.

Wonderful success story of Ali the tiny kitten to elderly cat!

Cathy

Cheryl wrote:
On Wed 20 Apr 2005 05:24:44p, wrote in rec.pets.cats.health+behav
roups.com):

Tell your friend good luck with the kitten. They really are
tougher than they look.

We're sending our good luck vibes to your friend too, Brandy!

Sherry, I was thinking that even at ~8 weeks they are tough to raise,

but then I got your meaning correctly. (rough day!) With Scarlett, it

was tough to get meat on her bones because she was such a picky
eater, and then all her problems with the URIs and the spay suture
reaction. I don't think I want to raise kittens anymore. However,
I've enjoyed the experience. I don't think I'd have the patience or
the time for the newborn Brandy's friend has rescued.

--
Cheryl

Oh, I don't mean it's easy to raise them, or that some of them don't
die no matter how hard you try. But we always had pretty good luck. We
had four kittens abandoned once that still had their umbilical cords.
You have to get up in the night and feed just like newborn babies. I
wish I had a pic. That was pre-digital camera. Domino, Angel, Purrcy
and Callie. I still think about them sometimes and wonder about them.
It's the ones you get at the shelter that are 3 weeks or so old, that
already have flea anemia or coccidia that it seems like have a horrible
mortality rate. Seems like it's easier to raise a healthy newborn than
a 3-6 week-old that's in bad shape.
Sherry

Sherry

On Thu, 21 Apr 2005 00:03:45 GMT, "Brandy*Alexandre"
wrote:

Cheryl wrote in
rec.pets.cats.health+behav:

On Wed 20 Apr 2005 05:24:44p, wrote in rec.pets.cats.health+behav
roups.com):

Tell your friend good luck with the kitten. They really are
tougher than they look.

We're sending our good luck vibes to your friend too, Brandy!

Sherry, I was thinking that even at ~8 weeks they are tough to
raise, but then I got your meaning correctly. (rough day!) With
Scarlett, it was tough to get meat on her bones because she was
such a picky eater, and then all her problems with the URIs and
the spay suture reaction. I don't think I want to raise kittens
anymore. However, I've enjoyed the experience. I don't think I'd
have the patience or the time for the newborn Brandy's friend has
rescued.


I know I couldn't do, but she's getting up in the night and feeding him
every two or three hours. He seems to let her know when he's hungry.
I thought maybe the cough was because she was feeding him on his back,
but she said she's not. She also has a heating pad with a lot of
padding so it doesn't get too warm. She's going to look for the
surrogate maybe in a week just to make sure he's going to survive.


A plastic drink bottle filled with warm water and stuffed in an old
sock makes a good surrogate momcat.

Watch that cough, kittens can go down fast. I'd be thinking about
calling the vet and putting it on a drop of Clavamox. That's what I
do for the whole litter the minute one starts coughing. Listen to
it's breathing. If it's noisy/ rasping, it may have pneumonia.

Watch the eyes. If one is glued shut, get eye ointment immediately.
Cherry eye is a common problem with feral/strays. I just had to have
an eye removed from a kitten who came to us too late.

There are recipes for formula on several web sites. If I'm
supplementing a poorly kitten, I use the powdered formula and add an
egg yolk, a little brown sugar, and liquid vitamins.

BarB