What To Give Newborn Kittens To Eat
Kittens from six to 12 weeks.
What to give newborn kittens to eat. Newborn kittens may nurse about every 1 2 hours. Feeding the wrong sort of milk such as cow s milk can have short term and long term effects including diarrhea dehydration nutritional deficiencies and long term health problems due to poor growth. Therefore in the first days of their life we must give them a substitute which will fulfill the same functions as colostrum. Without some canned food.
Very small kittens have very small teeth and can t chew dry food well. The following is a general eating schedule for newborns and young cats. Kittens that are bottle fed should consume about a tablespoon or 15 ml of special kitten formula at each feeding. Kittens have small teeth and thus they cannot chew on dry foods well this is why you need to give them wet foods as well.
If you plan to give the kittens both wet canned foods and dry foods then it is okay to give the kittens some canned foods twice per day. For the first month of life newborn kittens eat only the milk their mother produces. Its use is not only to give nutrients to the newborn kitten but also to provide passive immune defenses by transmitting immunoglobulins. A kitten that had a mother would receive the colostrum in their first hours of life.
At about three to four weeks old they can be offered milk replacer from a bowl and then small amounts of moistened kitten food four to six times. It s important that very young kittens have at least some canned food to eat as part of their diet. This is very time consuming for someone who is bottle feeding a newborn kitten so if at all possible you will want to try to keep the kitten with its mother or a surrogate lactating cat who can nurse it. However if you feed them with canned foods only then four times daily should be enough.