Feeding & Nutrition

What exactly do you do with a litter of four-day-old kittens whose mother has not come back, at ten o'clock at night, with everything shut? Most people reach for the fridge, warm some cow's milk, and start there. It is the single most common mistake in hand-rearing, and it is the one that kills.

Cow's milk is the wrong fluid. Queen's milk and bitch's milk are far richer in protein and fat and considerably lower in lactose than what comes out of a supermarket carton. Feed a neonate cow's milk and you get an animal that is simultaneously underfed and suffering osmotic diarrhoea, which in a body that small means dehydration within hours. Goat's milk and the various recipes involving egg yolk and condensed milk are variations on the same error. What you need is a commercial milk replacer made for the right species, kitten or puppy, mixed exactly to the directions on the tin. If the shops are shut, an electrolyte solution and a call to an out-of-hours vet will get a neonate through the night better than milk will.

Warm first, feed second

Before any of this, check the temperature of the animal. Neonates cannot regulate their own body heat for the first fortnight or so, and a chilled kitten or puppy cannot digest. Gut motility shuts down when they get cold, so milk sits in the stomach and ferments while you congratulate yourself on having fed it. If a neonate feels cool, warm it slowly against your body or with a covered heat source, and only offer food once it is properly warm and starting to wriggle and root.

Keep any heat source at one end of the nest box rather than under the whole thing, so they can crawl away from it. Overheating is as dangerous as chilling, and a newborn cannot always move itself far enough.

Getting milk in without getting it in the lungs

Warm the made-up replacer to roughly body temperature and test it on the inside of your wrist, as you would for an infant. Do not use the microwave. It produces hot spots that scald a mouth even when the bottle feels fine, and it degrades some of the nutrients. Sit in warm water instead.

Position is where inexperienced feeders go wrong. Never feed a kitten or puppy on its back like a human baby. They feed lying on their belly, chest down, head level and neck straight, exactly as they would at the mother. On its back, milk runs into the airway, and aspiration pneumonia in a neonate is very often fatal. Let the animal suckle at its own rhythm and never squeeze milk in. If the nipple hole is so large that milk drips out unaided it is too big; a drop should form slowly when the bottle is inverted. Milk bubbling from the nose means stop immediately, hold the animal head-down to drain, and call your vet.

Frequency and volume come from the tin, not from the internet, because replacers differ in concentration and the label is calculated for that product. As a general shape, newborns feed around the clock at intervals of a few hours, with the gaps stretching and the volumes rising as they grow. They should feed keenly and then sleep. A neonate crying constantly after a feed is usually still hungry, cold or unwell, and a limp, disinterested one needs a vet that day rather than another bottle.

Then the part people forget. Neonates cannot urinate or defecate by themselves until around three weeks of age; the mother licks them to trigger it. After every feed, wipe the genital and anal area gently with a warm damp cotton pad or soft cloth until they go. Skip it and they become constipated and distended, and their bladders do not empty properly. It is not optional and it is not squeamish work you can put off until morning.

The scale is the only honest referee

Everything else is impression. Weight is data. Buy a kitchen scale that reads in single grams, weigh every animal at the same point each day, and write the numbers in a notebook or on the wall next to the box. Healthy neonates gain steadily and reliably, roughly doubling their birth weight over the first week or two.

What you are watching for is a flat line. A kitten or puppy that fails to gain for a couple of days, or loses ground, is in trouble whether or not it looks it, and this is the earliest warning you will get of an infection, a congenital problem, a cleft palate or simply a feeding technique that is not delivering enough. Decline is fast, and by the time an orphan looks obviously ill it is often too late, which is why the scale beats your eyes. Get the litter checked by a vet early for parasites, palate defects and anything else that will not resolve on its own.

Gruel, mess, and the road to solid food

Weaning starts around three to four weeks, when teeth appear and they begin trying to lap and to bite the nipple. Mix milk replacer with a good quality growth-formula wet food into a thin gruel and offer it in a shallow dish. Expect them to walk through it, sit in it and wear it. That is the process, not a failure of it.

Thicken the gruel gradually over the following weeks while keeping bottle feeds going, tapering those as dish intake rises rather than stopping abruptly. Most are eating largely solid growth food by six to eight weeks. Fresh water goes down once they are taking solids. Whatever you move them onto must be formulated for growth, never adult maintenance food, and they should stay on it well past weaning.

Raise them together where you can. Littermates teach bite inhibition and social manners that a hand-reared singleton often never learns, and a kitten raised alone by a devoted human can grow into a difficult adult. Hand-rearing is exhausting, the losses are real even when you do everything right, and none of it is your fault when it happens.