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Kitties!
zilo
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
The girlfriend and I are adopting a pair of 3 month old kittens (2 males, same litter) from a local rescue group. We've both had cats before but my old cat was adopted when he was 10 months old and hers was when she was 5 years old.
What do we need to know about the care and feeding of teeny tiny cats? We're picking them up next weekend to give us time to kittenproof our condo (and for them to get neutered). We know to put cardboard around the fridge and stove, but what else? Is there a surefire way to keep kittens from chewing on power cords? I guess we're supposed to feed them wet food 3 times a day... for how long?
I beseech thee, H&A cat experts, for answers to these questions and any other kitten-related advice you care to offer. I'll post pics once we bring them home.
What do we need to know about the care and feeding of teeny tiny cats? We're picking them up next weekend to give us time to kittenproof our condo (and for them to get neutered). We know to put cardboard around the fridge and stove, but what else? Is there a surefire way to keep kittens from chewing on power cords? I guess we're supposed to feed them wet food 3 times a day... for how long?
I beseech thee, H&A cat experts, for answers to these questions and any other kitten-related advice you care to offer. I'll post pics once we bring them home.
zilo on
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You can try spraying cords with bitter apple or spraying the cats with water when they are naughty. You may also want to buy scratching posts so they don't start going after the furniture. Try to get them used to you touching their feet now so that later you can clip their nails without them wigging out.
Some dry foods are OK for cats with this problem, but your regular run of the mill dry food is shit. One of my cats has this - and I give them a mix of wet/good quality dry, and he hasn't had any re-occurrences in about a year now.
12 weeks is a good age to take a kitten home. Just buy some kitten chow, Purina Kitten food is what I gave mine and she was only 8 weeks old when I got her. They are pretty hardy little creatures.
I don't know where you live, but if there is a half price books or hastings or borders or just any kind of used/discount book store you should go look at the pets section. There are always a ton of books on cats and kittens. Just browse through them.
Have any of you done the "safe room" introduction thing, where you put all their stuff in a single room and keep them in there for the first 48 hours, or is it okay to just show them where the litter is and let them run around willy-nilly (worked fine with my old cat, but he was quite a bit older when we got him)?
Also, compressed air is a great deterrent if you don't want to spray water all over the cats. :P
*Cough*:P
Really, that's about all you need to do, too. I did that for my cat when he was a kitten, and he never shit anywhere else again. It's like they're drawn to the litterbox instictually.
Well, I think they have a strong instinctual desire to cover/bury their crap (they do this outside as well), and more than likely this is the only place inside your house where they'll be physically able to do so. So yeah, they'll generally pick up on it pretty quick.
Or buckets of sand. If you have sand or gravel for craft type objects, make sure to keep a lid on it. I learned this the hard way.
So we spent the day kittenproofing our condo. The little guys get neutered on Tuesday and we're picking them up Thursday or Friday. We did the big Petco run today. Looks like it's going to be an imagination Christmas for us. Yay! Imagination Christmas!
The plan is to confine them to the kitchen w/ their litterbox, carrier / bed which we'll line with our old t-shirts, food and water, and a crapload of toys and scratching thingamajigs. On Saturday we'll open it up and let them explore / hide in the rest of the place one room at a time.
Also, I found this stuff called Bitter Yuck to keep them from chewing on electrical cords. According to the label it's a mixture of water, sodium bicarbonate (which, according to wikipedia, can be used to remove semen from upholstry- learning is fun!), and .5% rosemary. I made the terrible, terrible mistake of tasting it. It is without a doubt the most awful thing I've ever put in my mouth, and I've tried haggis.
One more question. Anyone got a kitten-safe treat they'd like to recommend? We've used the Pounce brand soft treats before but the bottle says it's not safe for kittens.
It makes me sad, I hope she doesn't think we abandoned her
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
If you're worried about getting them used to scratching posts, just pick them up anytime they scratch anything and put them at their post, praise them for any efforts there. (I have not found any real value in shouting or spraying them when they are scratching something, because then they run away and you can't grab them to show them what to do instead, but thats your call I guess). My cats only took a few weeks to get used to their designated scratching areas.
Scratching posts do need to be in socially relevant areas. You can't hide one in the closet and expect the cat to go seek it out when they want to exercise their claws. The action is about scent marking and pleasure just as much. I have a large home and have about 10 posts, a mixture of the vertical rope kind, the flat horizontal cardboard kind and a couple of climbing opportunities.
As you've already said, just keep up with the current food for a while until they settle in. With regard to weaning them off the wet food - its really up to you. I recommend taking a glance at their water intake in the next few weeks. Assess whether they are drinking regularly. I use a flowing water fountain to encourage my cats to drink because my girl cat hates wet food. I've had good success with the flowing water but that might be too fancy for you, its really your call. If your cats are drinking regularly, I would say a month or so after they come home you could reduce their wet food intake. Make sure they are having regular, non-runny stools first to ensure they are healthy.
Did you get any advice about when they could be fed a little less frequently from 3 times a day? By the time my cats were 6 months old they just got once-daily feedings.
I do still feed my boy cat wet food, because he loves it. He gets a can mixed in with his regular dry food every second day. Nutritionally its useless because he only likes complete crap, but because I mix with the dry food it's really no big deal, he is still getting a good diet and loves me more for indulging him!
I have not heard of similar cases beside my own, but my experience with cats and bitter anti-chew sprays was horrifying. My 25lb Andre the Feline Giant destroys any phototrophs around my house. I applied it to a luckly 'bamboo' he has been picking shoots off of, then went about my own business. 30 minutes later I discovered him atop the fallen, shredded plant, gnawing away at its corpse like a fat man on a slab of ribs.
You may want to do a few tests before going to sleep with cats and wires unguarded together.
I think we'll be doing the wet food thing twice a day for awhile. Three times + dry food seems like a bit much. As for scratching stuff, we picked up this big cat jungle gym thing for $12, marked down to $22 from $100 w/ a $10 off coupon. It's got 2 big sisal scratching posts, one carpet scratching post, and a couple bed areas. We plan on throwing it down right next to the couch. We also grabbed a couple cardboard things and another sisal thing for strategic placement throughout the room. The plan is to have one scratching thing in every room with the biggest and most obvious one in the living room, where we spend most of our time.
Thanks for all the advice, all
Denatonium Benzoate. Hmm...
Dinah
Simon
New cat- Winni
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
Cat has no "name". Cat is simply referred to as "Cat":
Dryer picture is my favorite picture of Cat.
See how many books I've read so far in 2010
Also; awwwwwwww.
You know you're just supposed to use a towel to dry a cat off, right?
I know it, and you know it, but I don't think he knows it.
Some other early photos:
See how many books I've read so far in 2010
IOS Game Center ID: Isotope-X
Became this: