Help! I Found Baby kittens. Now What?

Amy Castro: 0:00

Well, I don't know what it's like where you are, but it's definitely spring in Texas, and you know what that means Getting outside and enjoying the weather before it gets too darn hot, spring cleaning and other activities. But what would you do if you found a litter of kittens while you were out doing all this stuff? Would you pick them up and bring them inside and rescue them, or would you leave them alone and let nature take its course? Well, on this episode, we're going to share with you exactly what you should do so that you can do the right thing, not only for the kittens but for yourself. Stay tuned. You're listening to Starlight Pet Talk, a podcast for pet parents who want the best pet care advice from cat experts, dog trainers, veterinarians and other top pet professionals who will help you live your very best life with your pets. We also share inspiring rescue and adoption stories from people who've taken their love of pets to the next level by getting involved in animal welfare.

Amy Castro: 0:50

My name is Amy Castro and I'm the founder and president of Starlight Outreach and Rescue and a columnist for Pet Age magazine. I've rescued thousands of animals and helped people just like you find the right pet for their family. My mission is to help pet parents learn all the ways that they can care for, live with and even have fun with their pets, so they can live their very best lives and their pets can, too. Welcome to Starlight Pet Talk. I'm your host, amy Castro, and I am going solo today again, and what I want to share is some information from a presentation that I do pretty frequently on what to do if you find baby kittens while you're out and about. It may be your instinct to snatch them up and bring them indoors, but could you be doing more harm than good? That's what we're going to talk about today. So, for those of you who don't know this and hopefully everybody knows this by now I am not only the host of this podcast, but the president of Starlight Outreach and Rescue, and Starlight Outreach and Rescue was founded in 2017 in honor of a young lady named Emma Starlight Hyde, who was a 14-year-old volunteer with me at a local animal control facility, and unfortunately, in October of 2017, emma passed away very tragically and suddenly, and that's when I decided to start Starlight Outreach and Rescue in her honor.

Amy Castro: 2:10

Although it was never our intention to be a cat rescue, we do rescue a lot of cats at Starlight Outreach and Rescue, and the reason for this oftentimes is because people don't know what to do when they come across a cat or kittens, or both, when they're out and about in the community or even in their own yards. So you've come across some baby kittens. Now what? Well, if you can get the answer to these three key questions, that's going to help you decide how to proceed. Question number one is assessing whether the kittens appear to be healthy, and I know you're not a veterinarian, but there are some things that you can look for to determine whether these are fat, healthy, well-cared-for kittens by their mama or whether they might need immediate human intervention. Question number two is the mother even around? A big mistake here is that people oftentimes assume mom is not around, but how do you know for sure? We'll talk about that. And then question number three is determining how old the kittens are, because if you decide that you need to take these kittens in, their age is going to determine how much work and how much effort it's going to be to keep them alive and healthy before they're ready to find them permanent homes. So let's dive into these questions. So, do the kittens appear healthy?

Amy Castro: 3:25

A couple of things that you're going to want to look for Eye discharge, nose discharge, crustiness around the eyes and nose that might be indicative of some type of upper respiratory infection. When kittens have a heavy upper respiratory infection, that means they're not breathing well through their noses, which means, just like when you have a human baby if you've got a human baby with a stuffy nose, it's not going to take a bottle very well or it's not going to be easy to breastfeed a baby like that because they can't breathe while they're eating. And very often kittens who develop upper respiratory infections won't nurse and then they're at risk of dying in that case. So what you're looking for is you're looking for signs of, like I said, discharge of the eyes, discharge from the nose, crustiness. It's also a good idea to assess and you can find tons of pictures on the internet of healthy and unhealthy kittens but assess their body weight. Do they look underweight? Can you see the spine or feel the spine easily? Kittens are not going to be like.

Amy Castro: 4:25

You might have heard about birds, about not touching baby birds, but even that is a myth, that if you touch babies that their mom won't come back. That's not going to be the case with kittens. You shouldn't overly handle them, but you could certainly touch them to see. Do you feel obvious ribs, obvious backbone? That would indicate that these kittens are underweight. So those would be some initial things to look for. Also checking their rear ends, you know. Do their rear ends look clean, which means the mother's probably been caring for them and maybe they don't have diarrhea? Or do they have crusty, red, raw looking bums? That might be an indication of some type of a parasite, infestation or other cause of diarrhea that could easily cause these kittens to become dehydrated and die. When you're seeing healthy kittens, they're going to be fat. Their heads are going to be fat and round and filled out. Ideally they wouldn't be crawling with fleas, although sometimes they might have some fleas. So the bottom line would be if they look pretty fat, pretty healthy, pretty clean, then I would not immediately jump into trying to pull these kittens and take them away at this time.

Amy Castro: 5:37

So question number two is the mom still around? First thing I would say is don't assume that the kittens are abandoned just because you don't see the mom. Mom could be out there hunting for food. Mom might have been scared away when you approached. Mom could be watching you right now and not wanting to draw attention to her baby. So she's hiding in the bushes somewhere. So don't make that assumption and immediately snatch up kittens.

Amy Castro: 6:00

What you really have to do is you have to be patient. A couple of things you can do Watch from a distance to see if mom comes back. Sit in a lawn chair 100 feet away. Watch with some binoculars 100 yards away. Watch from inside your house to see if the mom goes back into your garage. Whatever you need to do I also have found pretty good luck, depending upon where the kittens are nested is to sprinkle a little ring of flour or at least at access points in or around the nest or the. If it's in your garage, maybe at the entrance to the garage, to see if there's going to be footprints in that later on. That would indicate that the mom has come back.

Amy Castro: 6:42

The other thing you need to do, you know, as far as this, you know, being patient is kind of a fine balance. You don't want to wait too long because you certainly don't want the kittens to starve or become dehydrated, but again, don't want to intervene too soon. So part of this process and we're going to get to this in question number three is assessing how old the kittens are. If the kittens are under three weeks old, those babies will need to be fed approximately every two to four hours. So if you know that those kittens' eyes are still closed, for example, that means they are likely under 14 days and should not be left for more than four hours or so without being fed. So if you watch for four and a half hours and mom hasn't come back, it's time to start getting concerned. If the kittens are older maybe they're up and about walking, their eyes are opened then they might be able to go a little bit longer. So, again, that's going to go to assessing the kitten's age, which we're going to get to in a little bit. But there are a lot of great charts online that you can look at and we will share some as well. That would help you assess the kitten's age to know when do I need to step in, if at all? Another thing you can try doing is setting up a game camera or some type of other motion-sensitive camera to see if you catch mom coming back. The other thing I would say is, whether mom comes back or not, realize that there are no heroes that are going to step in and save you to take these kittens off your hands if you decide to intervene. So I would say highly, I highly recommend that you rescue kittens at your own risk and realize that it's quite possible. You will end up being fully responsible for them in many ways once you decide to take them in, so you might just be on your own.

Amy Castro: 8:29

You want to ask yourself a couple of questions. You know, are you willing and able to bottle feed kittens assuming they are bottle age kittens for up to as many as 30 days, depending upon the age of the kittens? When you find them, it could be around the clock. It could be every two to four hours around the clock. You know, if they're a little bit older, it might be a last feeding at midnight and a morning feeding at 5 am. What are you going to do when you go to work? Are you taking them with you? Are you getting somebody to come in and feed them for you?

Amy Castro: 8:59

It's a bit of a challenge. Have you actually contacted every single rescue to see if they can help? Because the mistake that people make is they think they're going to pick up these kittens and immediately pass them off to a shelter or a rescue, and very often that does not happen. Many, many rescues and shelters are filled to capacity or overfull and they might just tell you, no, they can't take them Shelters, especially if they are city or county shelters. They might take them and immediately euthanize them if they need to be bottle fed, because they don't generally have bottle feeders available to do that job, and it would be cruel and inhumane to leave kittens to starve 15 hours overnight, 18 hours overnight, whatever it is, while they're closed.

Amy Castro: 9:45

Are you going to be able to provide the food, the water and indoor shelter until they're old enough to be adopted? You're looking at about eight weeks at minimum. So where are you going to put these kittens if you decide to bring them in and you know the cost of kitten food, the cost of formula formula good formula is not cheap where are you going to physically put them? You know, can you put them in your bathroom or is that impossible? Do you have a spare bedroom or do you not?

Amy Castro: 10:06

Now you get into the the other tricky stuff, probably the trickiest part, if you happen to survive the eight weeks and those kittens can be adopted, or if you get some kittens that are six weeks, vaccinated, fecal samples to see if they've got worms, getting worming medication, etc. So that's going to be a financial challenge for some people. And then finding adopters if you decide to take them in on your own, the odds are you probably don't want or need six cats, eight cats, four cats, however, probably not eight. But you know you probably don't want or need that many cats. So how are you going to get them adopted? And I say this all from the sincerity of my heart, having been through this myself. I picked up a kitten. I didn't even need to pick up the kitten. The kitten had already been rescued by some ladies at a church. But I had to be a busybody and get all involved in it because I thought, oh, I know that my veterinarian has adoptable kittens in her lobby and certainly I can just bring this kitty cat up here. And so Pickles the cat who I now still have, by the way, 14 years later, you know I took her from these church ladies and said, oh, I can take care of this for you. And I drove straight to my vet and they were like yeah, no, sorry, and the rescue was full. And so Pickles the cat is now my cat. So you will get stuck if you don't, if you don't think that process through.

Amy Castro: 11:38

So let's talk about a couple of different scenarios. If you come across these kittens, you know if the mom is still around. So you've done the flower test, or you've used your game camera and you're like, yep, she's still coming back to feed them. Ideally, you want to leave these babies with their mom as long as you possibly can. So you've got a couple of options. One would be to trap or capture the mom and the babies, and ideally you would. If you think you're going to take them to a shelter or rescue, you would contact their shelter or rescue first to see if they'll take them. Or you have a plan for keeping them safely indoors until the babies can be weaned and adopted.

Amy Castro: 12:17

What you might have a challenge with there is sometimes these moms that are having kittens out in the community are friendly former house pets or have been raised being handled by humans. Sometimes they're not. Sometimes they were raised out in the wild and they're kind of like wild cats. So if the mom is feral or you can't catch her in any way, ideally what we try to tell people is leave the babies at least until weaning age, so at least until they're a good four weeks old assuming they're safe where they are, assuming they're healthy and let mom care for them before you intervene, because otherwise you're depriving them not only of the physical most appropriate nourishment from their mother, but also the socialization skills that she's going to teach them about how to be a cat and how to get along with other cats along the way.

Amy Castro: 13:08

The problem is you don't want to wait too long if the mom is feral and again, if you plan on at least capturing these kittens to see if maybe you can get them adopted. The longer you wait, the more feral they might become, learning from their mom's behavior, and the harder it will be to tame them down the road. So we have found at Starlight Outreach and Rescue that kittens that are 12 weeks or older become very, very hard to turn into house pets. It's not impossible. Some of them you can do it really easily and some just it doesn't happen. And so you know you probably are looking at that. More than four weeks, but less than seven weeks somewhere in there. You know if you can safely leave them with mom for about six or seven weeks, that's great. If you need to pull them a little bit earlier and finish the weaning process, it's probably better than allowing them to stay out feral, unspayed and unneutered.

Amy Castro: 14:06

You also are going to have to determine and you might not have any choice on this, because you might come across kittens that are older or younger, but part of the process is figuring out, you know, is this mom and kittens a family that I can get adopted, or would it be better for me to intervene in the form of getting them to a veterinarian to get them spayed and neutered and putting them back where I found them? So that's a question you're going to need to ask yourself, based on your situation, based on the behavior of the animals, how old the kittens are when you find them, etc. If you find that the mom is not around, then you probably need to trap or capture those kittens and take care of them. If you can't intervene in some form or fashion, the kittens are not going to survive, especially if they are super young kittens and not able to eat solid food and nobody's feeding them. So, moving on to our final question, and this is a tricky one for a lot of people and it's interesting because people will call and they'll say oh, I found these tiny, tiny baby is they've never seen a tiny, tiny kitten. You know that newborn kittens are probably the size of three quarters of a hot dog, maybe a little bit wider, but you get my drift on that. So they're pretty darn small. And so if they're up and their eyes are open and they're walking around and playing, those are probably some older kittens. But either way, there's easy ways to make some determinations. A great great website to check out is kittenladyorg and actually if you go to wwwkittenladyorg forward slash age A-G-E, the kitten lady Hannah Shaw has some fantastic charts that give you an idea of how old these kittens might be. So definitely check that out. But generally newborn kittens kittens are going to, you know, like new newborn less than a week old. They might still have umbilical cord attached, their eyes are going to be closed, their ears are going to be scrunched down and kind of folded over, and one of the most important things about them is they cannot regulate their body temperature at this age. So if it is cool out, if mama's even if it's not that cool out if mama's not around these kittens definitely need to be taken in quickly and put on a heating source because they can't maintain their body temperature At about a week or so generally, your kitten's eyes are going to start opening as early as eight days, but could be as late as two weeks.

Amy Castro: 16:52

So that you know if the eyes are opening or starting to look like they're wanting to open, you can actually see the slit in the eyelid. That can give you a little bit of an indication that those kittens may be somewhere between 8 and 12, 8 and 14 days. The ears are probably still going to be folded, but the umbilical cord should be gone at this point. At about two weeks or so their eyes should be pretty much open. They're going to look like they have blue eyes and they may or may not be walking around. If they do, they're going to be super duper wobbly on their feet.

Amy Castro: 17:26

From there on up it's a matter of looking at things like teeth and ears. So a kitten that's about three weeks or so old is going to start having its teeth are going to start to emerge, the ears are going to look more pointy and erect like a regular cat and they can start figuring out the litter box as early as that age, assuming you give them an age and size appropriate litter box. And from there on out it's a pretty subtle growth process. It's about when teeth are emerging. How well are they walking? When can they start eating, which is you're probably looking at about five weeks to start getting them onto canned food. So you're bottle feeding up until then.

Amy Castro: 18:09

Another guideline that we oftentimes will use is the weight of the kitten, is that once they get after about four weeks or so, they generally gain and again, this is just a wide ballpark, but they generally gain about a pound a month. So sometimes you can put the kitten on a postage scale or a food scale and get an idea from that. But you know, at six weeks they're, you know they're going to have a lot more teeth. They're going to be eating pretty well on their own At seven weeks. Their eye color, their true eye color is going to start showing up by the time they get to be eight to 12 weeks, which is generally about the time that they get adopted. They are usually doing a pretty good job of eating dry food if you feed dry food and you know, once they get to that point, that's usually our deciding factor as to when we start thinking about adopting kittens out if they are reliably eating dry food on their own, drinking plenty of water, although we really don't like dry food. We know that a lot of people like to feed that because it's convenient, and so we generally won't let kittens go to adopters until we know they're able to do that, because we don't want them to become malnourished or dehydrated or anything like that. So, again, make sure you check out the wwwkittenladyorg forward slash age. Those are some great charts on that website, but there are also other sites as well that you can find those charts. So I hope that gives you at least a little bit of an idea of what you can do if you come across some kittens.

Amy Castro: 19:44

Taking them in, as I've mentioned, is a huge responsibility. Don't take it lightly. Make sure you do it with education. You've gotten a little bit in this podcast episode and I hope it was helpful. And if you want to get involved in helping baby kittens when they end up in rescues, definitely check out your local rescues, your local shelters. Find out if they have an infant kitten bottle feeding program or if they have a need for bottle feeders. I will say, although it is a lot of work and you lose some sleep over it, it's incredibly rewarding to see these tiny, tiny babies grow and develop under your care. So if you're in the Houston area and you want to reach out to us at starlightoutreachandrescueorg, and we'd love to have you on board as a volunteer.

Amy Castro: 20:32

Thanks for listening to Starlight Pet Talk. Be sure to visit our website at wwwstarlightpettalkcom for more resources, and be sure to follow this podcast on your favorite podcast app, so you'll never miss a show. If you enjoyed and found value in today's episode, we'd appreciate a rating on Apple. Or if you'd simply tell a friend about the show, that would be great too. Don't forget to tune in next week and every week for a brand new episode of Starlight Pet Talk. And if you don't do anything else this week, give your pets a big hug from us.