Caring for a newborn baby kitten

Video Transcript:

Warning 5 start cuteness rating

By Amy from Clean Litter Club

Hey, Amy here from Clean Litter Club. It is kitten season right now, the time of year when kittens are left abandoned on the side of the road or left with their mama and you might find a kitten or a batch of kittens that you might not know how to take care of. So our local San Antonio Animal Defense League takes volunteers to foster baby kittens like this and we have volunteered to foster this year. So I wanted to make this video to show you what goes into taking care of a baby kitty like this. Ours name is Vincent and he is 2 weeks old, we’ve had him for a week which makes him 3 weeks old now, but he’s pretty easy to take care of. We have 3 cats of our own so the biggest thing is just making sure that our other cats aren’t stressed. So we don’t bring the kitten around our other cats we keep him separated completely. We feed him every 3 hours, we make sure that he sleeps on a warm heating pad with some towels on top, and we just bottle feed him and we also stimulate him to go to the bathroom after feeding. He sleeps through the night so we don’t have to feed him every 3 hours throughout the night so that’s also good to know. Hopefully this video where I’m showing you these tips will help you if you happen to encounter a baby kitten that needs to be taken care of.

Some things that you might need when taking care of a newborn kitten are right here. We have first the formula, KMR. This is what makes the bottle of milk. And what we do is we take two of the small scoops of this and we mix it in this little container. You could really use a cup or anything that works for you. We put two scoops and then we fill it up with water to about here and then just shake it up. You want the water to be room temperature so that its safe for the baby. A good way to check that is to put a little dot on your wrist and make sure that you can’t really feel anything so you moms out there will know how to do that. This is a nursing kit to kind of show you what you can get to be able to bottle feed a kitten, and then the wipes are used to stimulate them to go to the bathroom after you feed them. And then just a bottle cleaning brush.

Over here we’re prepping the bottle, you can keep the bottle in the fridge throughout the day, this is what the bottle actually looks like. In the beginning you have to cut a tiny hole in the top of the nipple. In a minute we’re going to go feed the kitten so you can see how the kitten kind of suckles onto this nipple. We just take warm water and put it in the microwave and then we set the bottle inside of there and leave it sit for a few minutes and then we’re able to test to make sure you know you put that little droplet on your wrist so you can make sure that its good. Our kitten is 3 weeks old and this morning this bottle was full up to the 45 cc line and already today we feed every 3 hours and already he’s pretty thirsty. He wasn’t drinking this much in the beginning but now he’s drinking a full line every feeding.

This is Vincent our baby kitty, he’s very excited to be fed. I’m gonna let Vincent out let him walk around a little bit. Vincent, where are you going? He’s very noisy. Rashied’s about to feed him, but here he is. Some other things that you might need are a towel, folded up several times on top of a heating pad. And you can see this is just a small pet carrier and we have the towel on top of it to prevent drafts. So you want to make sure that the towel that you have inside of here is fully covering the heating pad so that your little baby doesn’t get burned. But you put it on medium and you can just leave it on all the time and that way the baby stays warm when you’re done feeding him. Rashied here is about to feed the baby. He’s the one who got us into this foster volunteer mess. He’s the cat whisperer. There he is, “hey Vincent”. So we’ll show you how we feed Vincent.

You want to take a towel, because these little guys are squirmy. You just take a towel and wrap them up so they feel nice and warm and safe. You want to make sure you don’t hold them on their back like a baby even though you might want to do that when you bottle feed. But you just kind of hold them upright and then as he’s meowing pretty soon he suckles right on and he starts feeding. Their first instinct if you can’t get them to suckle right away what you can do is act like their momma and pet them right between the eyes because that’s where they’d kinda lick them. You can see that he will just grab the bottle just like he would be making muffins of kneading biscuits on his mama while he’s drinking. It’s really sweet, they’re super cute. In the beginning we had trouble feeding Vincent he wouldn’t take the bottle. So we ended up making sure we stimulated him a lot and pet him in between the eyes and made sure we tried to act like his mama as much as we could. In the beginning we could barely get him to drink just a few cc’s and now he’s a little pro. Sometimes they’ll need a little break and that’s ok. You just try again.

Ok so Vincent’s all done eating. We know because when we try to put the bottle back in his mouth he’s like “nope, I’m not doing that”. So you might wonder you don’t need a litter box when you have a baby kitty this little (2-3 weeks old) because they don’t really go on their own unless they’re stimulated or after a little while of stimulation they probably do go on their own a little better. But there’s no need to litter box train them when they’re this little. What you do is you just take a standard wipe and you hold them and what you want to do is just like their mother would clean the back of their private parts to make them go to the bathroom you’re doing the same thing with a wipe. And they’ll actually go to the bathroom right in the wipe. So it’s good to have a towel or something on your lap to prevent you from getting wet and messed up. You just wipe really gently along their back and they will go to the bathroom right into the wipe and then you can just throw the wipe away and you’re good to go. So no need to litter box train them the only thing you’ll need to take care of is every time after you feed them maybe let them walk around a little bit until they, you don’t want them to get cold, then just throw away the wipe, wash your hands, put the bottle back in the refrigerator, a bottle is good for 24 hours, and everyday make a fresh bottle. We feed them every 3 hours and then they go right back in, really they are just like baby’s they eat and they sleep. They go right back into their little house. We’ll let him run around for a bit and put him back in the carrier and he’ll go right to sleep. And in a few hours when he’s hungry he’ll get up and want to eat again. Alright Vincent say goodbye to Clean Litter Club. BYE!!

Thanks to San Antonio Animal Defense League for their tireless work in saving and caring for animals. Subscribe and find us on social media @CleanLitterClub