So I open my front door yesterday and there's this kitten just laying there on the porch. Loud mewing also reveals another kitten rolling around in the middle of the yard. I collect the kittens and put them in a box with an old shirt to keep warm. Momma cat never returned after many hours, so I brought them inside, bought some milk replacer and a small feeding bottle.

I think I may keep them, as I've been wanting a pet.

I've done a little research and been trying to keep them warm, clean and feed them every two hours. The one kitten won't take to the bottle, I've basically had to force it on him with a medicine dropper I'm wondering if they'll be ok on their own for about 10 hours while I'm away at work.

Anyone here have any advice for newborn kittens and what kind of things to expect / do in the coming weeks??

Do expect:

lots of pee-pee, pooh-pooh, meaow-meaow.

Do not expect:

society's gratitude, the Coveted Cat Award, anyone to adopt them.

Ok, do you have any idea how old they are, as it doesnt sound like they are very old and 10 hours is definatley to long for a young kitten to survive for long without feed, as you would be fighting a losing battle.


This is not a bad website, but kittens are a lot of work, and constant, as they dehydrate auickly, when young.
But on the plus side if you do rqaise them you will have fantasticd pets as a hand raised kitten is wonderful.
http://catvet.homestead.com/Orphans3.html

Hot water bottle....tucked under their bedding, and wrapped in an old towel...and a wind up clock if you have it.

Also...remember you have to simulate washing them...like their mother would...with a face flannel...warmed and slightly damp...you have to wash their little bottoms...it stimulates the wee kittens to defacate and urinate...

10 hours?....sheesh!...please try and feed them in shortened time periods prior to you going out, and as soon as you get home, feed and wash them...

while you are out...perhaps you can find a fluffy toy?...it will help them feel tucked in tight, and also keep them a little warmer.

hahaha!!! Listen to us two Josie!


Now if it was an orphaned joey...we would be right onto it!

Well they still have their umbilical cords so just born yesterday or the night before.

And I read that

"A newborn kitten cannot urinate or defecate on his own until he is about 2 ½ weeks old. You should keep an eye on mom and make sure she is licking and cleaning her kittens’ bottoms. If she is not (or not available to do so), you will have to do this yourself."

I think I'll stick to the cloth method lol

Yes I was worried about leaving them at home while I go to work. At least its better than being abandoned in my front yard.



unfortunately..

Keeping them rehydrated... could it be done by laying them in a bowl of milk that is compatible with their digestive systems to drink? The bowl has to be kept warm, pleasantly warm, of course, and you could put in as much milk as to have them satisfied and not to run out till two hours before you come home.

Are you willing to get up every two hours in the night, to feed them and to lick their furry little kaannts? Because if not, then you have to keep them in my cat-baby-craddle-for-lazy-mothers invention as described above, at night as well.

I suspect you will also encounter more obstacles in raising them, in the methodolgy of how to teach them to catch mice and other smaller, unprotected, little and helpless animanls, and how to lay each other when nature calls for propagating the species. Also, you need to teach them how to sharpen their nails, because without sharp and unpainted nails they won't look attractive to the males. (You need a wife or a gf to teach them this, coz they are better at it than us human males.)

Maybe this is why you are on this website, to find a good and proper substitute mom for the kittens, who will teach them the skills of how to wrap a male around their fingers.

Or maybe you got the kittens coz it's a good pressure point in selling to a female the idea to move in with you -- the kids! The Kitties!! They can't go without a mummy, they need you, and need you NOW, Anasthasia!!

(Hee hee) if you by mistake set the temparature too high under the Bowl of Rehydration, then that won't be a problem, either, you'll have a year's supply of Catsup when you come home from work.

This exercise will be good basically for the purpose that you will know just exactly how much work goes into a new born baby, and you will develop more appreciation for women too, who are more willing and happy to do this sort of shoot work for a newborn than men. You are my hearo, Scorpio, because I can't keep even a canary. I had two cats for eighteen years, but they were easy to keep, because they were young adults when I adopted them. The male came fixed, and the female was released to me from the pound only after I swore on my mother's grave that I'll get her fixed -- at the time of adoption she was just a bit too young to go under the knife. (Four months old, their vet thought.)

I remember the first time I went into that blasted place, where they kept the cats. I came out of the roomful of cages, and went into a corner and cried very hard for an hour. I was shaking, I was crying so hard.

Cats do that to you, and women.

Be forewarned. Approach at your own risk.

I'm well aware of the risk but somehow have not yet learned not to take it

And have seen the dreaded room of cages before too. Its horrible

Joey's I hsave dealt with, they are so cute like little babies..

It Can’t Be Explained

Gabriel took Susannah and begat Behemoth, Goliath, Sampson, Sammy and Susan. Sampson took Rebecca and begat Zachariah, Zippo, Isaac, Ruth and Babe. Zachariah took Jojo and begat one son, Sammy.

After opening his eyes to the world and spending his childhood mainly staying hungry, Sammy was sold into slavery as a worker. His job was to lose fights to the stronger of his brethren, who would then go on with their education, and later, into service.

Sammy was awakened every morning against his own will, by his hunger usually. The trainer would bring in food for him and the five others with whom he shared a cell. The usual fight for the food always left the weaker ones still hankering for more, as they were regularly squeezed out of the inner circle of eaters around the food trough. The members of the inner circle were left hankering for more food, too. It was not surprising that the mood of the group would heavily hang over the pen as the inmates scratched, yawned, stretched, stood up, took a few steps at random and sat down and scratched again. If their collective mood had ever manifested itself, it would have taken on the material form of a resonance; of the type of longitudinal waves progressing through air, in the exact frequency and wave-form that makes the sound of the grumbling of empty stomachs.

Later on, another trainer would come into the pen and leash and lead out the worker whose turn it was on the roster to work that day – luckily it happened only every third day for each worker, for one in the morning, for another in the afternoon shift.

Each of the workers was happy the first three times he was lead out of the pen by the trainer – the very first three times in his life and then not once more. The somewhat nervous and buoyant excitement of the worker, as he would gaily pull the leash along the chicken-wire cages housing other packs of six dogs in each, had grown slowly into a nervous and torn staccato of a walk, where the worker pulled on the leash in random directions. They had no concept of a walkie as society dogs did, who were used to a ritual occurring three times a day, in which they were taken from their comfortable homes to the street or the park, to indulge themselves in such pleasures as sniffing trees, lamp posts and fire hydrants and in such delights as relieving themselves in a fashion that was nearly natural for them and which caused the walker to bend down and collect the leftovers into a plastic bag.

No, the worker just walked along in his jagged way, until they came to a cage, inside of which he was let together with a strong, young warrior. The warrior stood or sat silently until the trainer issued a command, at which point the warrior flew against the worker. The worker defended himself as best as he could, but it was a rare occasion, and without the satisfaction of the glory of victory as in a prize fight, that he would defeat the warrior. When indeed that happened, the worker would be lifted out of the ranks and disposed of. How? Well, he could not be trained as a warrior, due to his lack of familiarity with the paradigm of “training”. He could not be let to a good home, as he would tear the kids into pieces. His meat could be used neither in restaurants nor to feed carnivores in the zoo, as it would deprive the zoo animals of sufficient amounts of nutrients while an herbivore for a meal would not. They could not be recycled either, like in the old days of using dog-hide documents and organic glue. So they just disappeared.

In the middle of the fight the human trainer would blurt out a command that made the warriors stop in their tracks during the marauding, retreat from it and sit down calmly. The workers could smell the meaty, appetising scent of something that flew through the air thrown from the trainer’s hand, and see it disappear in a quick snap of the warrior’s jaws.

Once in a while a strange thing would happen. People different from the trainers would enter the cages, take each dog to a trough, wash and bathe them with soap, while still others would hose the ground in the pens, effectively soaking the waste, the smell, and the flea eggs into the depths of the barren earth of the cage. Thus was the ground cleansed. After the dogs were let back into their cages, a whole different set of strangers came and took pictures and handed out treats and asked the trainers questions, and then happily scribbled something into their notebooks and left. Within an hour life would return to normal.

This July morning it was Sammy’s turn to go and face warrior Impala (short for Vlad the Impaler) in yet another heavily biased fight when the trainer’s superior asked him a question over the P.A. system in the yard. The relief trainer was on vacation, and in a state of minor temporary confusion stemming from not knowing what to do with the dog, the trainer led Sammy into the building. When he reported to the commander of the camp, he was still holding Sammy on the end of the leash. The thunderous reproach from the commander made the trainer more confused and he let go of his end of the leash as he snapped into attention. Sammy sat down, scratched, and then wandered away. He wandered through a maze of corridors, out through the main entrance and into the bright freedom of the outside world.

Sammy got at first intoxicated by the plethora of exciting, strange smells. He ran and peed, and peed and ran along the road, into the fields, and farther on. Later he only pretended to pee as his reservoir had been fully depleted.

He ran past huge and inexplicable animals that would run along on soft, round, quickly turning black hooves, apparently without moving a muscle. Stranger things have been known to happen. He saw bands of humans standing around a glass house only to be swallowed by a large wheeled animal. He saw other dogs; some barked at him and charged him but were stopped abruptly by some other inexplicable force. He never got close enough to another dog so as to let them engage him in a fight. He had learned harm avoidance well by then.

Sammy saw rivers of blue water, rivers of asphalt. He saw large animals that were like dogs but there were trainers sitting on top of them. He saw humans of all sizes, shapes, colours and smells. There were small dogs that smelled un-doglike, and they hissed and ran away as he approached them. He saw huge holes in the ground that would spew people out at regular intervals and swallow more back down. He saw the wonder of the Building, the kind of thing he had had the good fortune of experiencing earlier. There were many buildings, or maybe just one that was long, very long. There were many Main Entrances in this city of Buildings. He did not feel like entering, though. He saw trees – never had before, but he immediately knew what they were and what they were for. He smelled smells of unimaginable hue, strength and in an infinite variety. That’s what he liked the best, he thought. He would pick up a few things in his mouth that lay in his path as he galloped along the streets. He had forgotten about his pen, his working comrades, the warriors, the trainers. Their memory was pushed out of the forefront of his conscious mind by the work that his mind needed to perform to digest this huge amount of new information.

By evening he found himself totally exhausted, hungry and thirsty, and in the company of two large dogs, who flanked him and forced him to walk over a plank into the cargo of a van. Sammy was driven to a big building where he was fed, made to drink, weighed, nose-printed and examined. He underwent surgery as well, which made him drowsy for days and weak for weeks. Then he was put in a cage all by himself. They put a little note on his cage that read, “I’m Zorro. I’m compassionate, but a bit erratic. I would love you to take me home to your adult home with no children, and give me tender loving care with fair but firm discipline. Please remember my name: Zorro.”

Life was a great deal more comfortable but a whole lot more boring than in the training camp. A man, who smelled of dog feces came in one day, took him for a test-walk, paid the keepers and drove him home to his house. There he put him in a bedroom that had already housed about ten other dogs.

It was sheer hell in there. The dogs were never taken out for walks; they were never supervised. They formed their own societies with rules that they made up and assumed their individual roles in it. Sammy-Zorro was at the bottom of the pecking order of food, at the bottom of the totem pole of fights and at the bottom of the heap of nightly group reposes. This went on for months, years; once in a while a corpse disappeared and at other times another supporting pillar of the totem pole society joined in at the bottom.

One day the man who would bring food and water stopped bringing them. A week or two later a bunch of humans broke down the front door. The local papers were full of emotional articles written by indignant, angry reporters. “Shocking. Absolutely shocking. With no food or water these dogs must have gone through living hell comparable to World War II concentration camps. The stench was like a brick wall, penetrating, stabbing, and altogether intolerable after being in there for mere seconds, even after the windows were opened. This is for the human nose, so can you imagine, gentle reader, the suffering and despair of the dogs that were imprisoned and unable to escape this situation on their own.” The dogs were taken out to the lawn, carefully, and blonde upper-echelon ladies of Anglo-Saxon origin washed them, bathed them, fed them with sweetened milk, and tended to their wounds with expert loving care.

Sammy looked at the lady who was personally taking care of him. His deep, brown, anguished eyes full of the sorrow of a thousand torturous pains met her loving, fresh gaze, emanating from her beautiful clear blue eyes. Her supple, soft skin smelled exciting and soothing at the same time. Her hair swung gently in the balmy breeze of the early autumn. Her girlishly slender body curled gracefully as she sat on her heels in the grass, tending to Sammy.

All around them on the lawn were dogs and their personal care givers; all around them were the hushed voices of the women and the rustle of their expensive summer dresses. All around them was the gentle hum of sweet-smelling, caring femininity; and all around them was calm, peace and fulfilment of dreams.

By night time Sammy had been walked, and fed with so much food that his belly was tight like a drum. He had been checked out by a veterinarian. The woman, his personal caregiver, was still on his side, and she sang quiet, soothing lullabies to him. She would gently stroke his neck, dreamily and lovingly fold his ears, and piously rub his stomach. She would gingerly take his jaw in her two hands and gaze into his eyes, as her tears silently trickled down her cheeks in a non-stop flow. She kissed him on the nose and whispered his name. Sammy eventually fell asleep; his last memory of waking moments was an image of the loving, caring, concerned look of the blonde Anglo-Saxon society lady as she was keeping guard over his eyes and his breath.

Sammy is chewing on a nice and juicy shoulder-bone of a deceased cow. He’s living with my grandfather now after having gone through the adoption process again. He looks up and lets out a warning but non-aggressive growl at the cat, who is walking past, idly, showing only a hint of curiosity about the grinding sound that Sammy’s teeth make on the bone and the associated smells. She nonchalantly changes course and veers away. Grandpa is in the kitchen, taking the chocolate cake from the fridge he baked the previous night. Since he’s become widowed, he’s joyfully gained control of the kitchen and found meaning in cooking, after a life-long career in paediatrics. I visit him on Thursdays to take my fill of his culinary achievements and to silently admire the youthfulness of his health, movements, mind and bright optimism. They clearly belie his eight decades of life. And they belie his near-death experience due to starvation, exhaustion, torture and disease in Auschwitz more than sixty years ago.

Sammy looks up momentarily as Grandpa carries the cake in. Their eyes meet, and I catch, as always, the look that binds them – be it in a fleeting glance or a long-lasting gaze. Though the look may be loving, reproachful, playful or attentive, like between a man and his best friend, I always see the depth in it that takes them a million miles closer to each other, to a world where only the two of them exist, to a world which is the place of togetherness for those who lived through horrors that others can perhaps imagine, but never fully fathom.

Is there anyone who could feed them once through the day,,The cloth works fine,

Now a Kanga would make a cool pet!!

One bad thing. Sorry to tell you, but if the kittens never had a chance to nurse, they got none of their mother's cholostrum. This is where babies get their immunities. Without them, they will die. No chance of survival. If they are still alive after the first day or two, then you're probably safe on that account. (You can buy cholostrum substitute at a farm store)

If they become severely dehydrated, which is common with orphans that get too cold, it is not enough to just give them fluids. Their electroly
tes will need to be balanced. Pedialyte is good for that. When we had orphaned new-borns, the first thing we did was to give them the hottest bath we could stand. (Scalding doesn't seem to be a problem). We would inject enough sterile water under their skin to make sure that muscles all has good ready access to fluids.

This routine didn't always save them, but it usually did.

No-one. My options are to leave them at home near a heater, unattended, or leave them in my car at work where I can feed them now and then, but it will get cold in there after dark.

They are a gorgeous pet, especially as they have little hands and can help hold their bottles and when they start to eat they can hold their food, and they jump around your floors and climb back into their pouches to sleep. so so cute.

One more thing. In these early days, keeping them hydrated is much more important that keeping them constantly fed. They will have some fat reserves for calories for a while.

Well I know that they are at least 24 hours old. Seem like they are surviving at least, they sleep most of the time. Don't cry much only when I pick them up or when one steps on the other. They squirm and seem pretty strong for their size. I'll do what I can, at least its better than nothing.

good luck! Bringing little orphans through is a wonderful thing. The first time I saved a baby that should have died, it made me feel like a god!

Well now.
My 5 kittens were born in my garage and
abandoned that very day.

I brought them in.
Keeping them warm was the hardest thing,
lost one overnight.
When I talked to the vet, she said that
most baby kittens die from improper use
of the baby bottle, she herself had
choked a few trying to save them.

I was up all night for 2 weeks feeding
and caring for them, I never left them
alone for a minute, they would have
gotten too cold and died..

One initial bath, to rid of fleas, then
never again.
The secret there was, a really hot towel
to dry them, the heat draws out the fleas.

They did not poopie for 7 days or so,
I was terrified.
You rub their little tummies to stmulate
poopytude, works really well, just stroke
their bellies with one finger in a circular
motion heading downwards (toward the
poop chute.)

Had them on solid food at 3 weeks,
a blessing.
In to the vet at 6 weeks, all shots given
for immunities. (They all got the same
upper respiratory infection.)
Booster shots every 3 years.
That was 8 years ago.
They thrive.

One thing.
They do not know they are cats.
Shhhhhhh.
I may tell them when they are 18.