Weaning kittens 101

[AvadaKedavra]

Help!

Have had a mum cat and 4 kittens of 3 weeks old dumped on us and no idea where to start and when to start and how to start and .... you get the idea!

Weaning kittens for dummies please, google is throwing up too many different things and am getting confused with it all and want to do our best by them.

They don't really need to start solid food for another week or so I think.
then buy some kitten food and offer them a bit, some will take to it really quickly and others might not be interested. One of mine didn't show much interest until about 6 weeks and her mum was getting fed up with her by then!

when the mother cat starts to tell them off when they go for a feed is when you need to start weaning them.
You can mush the food up with some water so its quite liquidy like they are used to, they get into a lot of mess as they walk in it and fall in it, once they are able to manage ot you can use less and less water.

HTH its been a while since my cat had kittens.

Wowzee. I personally wouldnt start thinking about weaning them yet. My cat had 6 kittens and we started weaning at 7weeks, they still took milk from mum up till 14 weeks and we sold them when they reached 16weeks.

I know alot of people get rid of kittens at 8 weeks but imo that is way too young, obviously 16 weeks is probably too long for most people, but start at 7 weeks and they should be eating really well by 10 weeks.

hth

Thanks for the info. What would you recommend for first food?

We fed ours whiskers kitten pouches, we started with spreading about 1 or 2 pouches around the edge of a big plate to gauge their interest, then once they were wolfing it down three-so half a pouch each then after a week or two a pouch each.

we also bought a milk supplement from our vet because mum cat was losing alot of weight and finding it hard feeding them all, so wed give them some of that too-best to take vet advice if you do this though as it can end up giving them the runs if you give too much.

if your going to keep mum cat, id start thinking about having her spayed-she can be done AFTER shes finished feeding the kittens... unless you want more kittens in 2/3 months

Offer the mum kitten food - good nutrition for a feeding mother. Kittens will only start taking some when they are ready anyway. On to new homes about 8 weeks old and mum into vets asap at that point for spey. Meanwhile the kittens need to be wormed now and at 5 and 8 weeks - contact your vet to buy some liquid wormer that you can use. Mum also needs worming too.