What Do Newborn Kittens Eat

Your new kitten is playful and cute as can be.

What do newborn kittens eat. When do kittens start eating solid food. Pet food labels are required to carry a statement identifying the life stage or stages for which the food is intended. 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. Set an alarm so you don t miss those middle of the night feedings.

After the first four weeks of mother s milk a kitten gradually transitions to kitten food and is completely weaned at about eight weeks. When kittens are first born they are completely helpless their eyes are closed their ears are folded and they can t stand keep themselves warm or eat on their own they rely on mom for everything. What do kittens eat besides milk. Kittens that are bottle fed should consume about a tablespoon or 15 ml of special kitten formula at each feeding.

Learn more about newborn kittens in our kitten guide. It does provide her with nutrients that she passes through her milk to the surviving kittens. A newborn kitten can only digest milk and more specifically the milk from a female cat. Also look for a food that has been substantiated by a food trial.

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. Newborn kittens eat cat s milk only. Only she doesn t eat much or at all. When the orphaned kittens are three to four weeks old begin to offer milk replacer in a shallow bowl then introduce a moist easily chewable diet.

While it can be barbaric to watch it s almost second nature for your mother cat to eat her stillborn kittens. Just born kittens have a particular diet of cat milk. Newborn kittens require food every one to two hours for the first week of life then every three hours from seven to 14 days of life. Proper feeding is a big part of the health equation.

Kittens expend a lot of energy and shouldn t go very long without eating. Breastfeeding a kitten lasts about 9 weeks and when their teeth begin to come in after about four weeks they can begin to eat food. Feed your kitten a food that is made specifically for kittens.