When a mama cat is absent, newborn kittens require around-the-clock human care and a heating pad to lie on. They find her milk by sniffing and pawing. To survive, they need their mother to keep warm and nurse. They don’t stand up until they’re a month old. They need a lot of care from their mothers, in comparison with baby animals such as foals, which stand up within an hour of birth.ĭuring the first week and a half of their lives, kittens’ eyes are sealed closed and their ears are folded up, making them practically blind and deaf. Newborn kittens are particularly vulnerable because they’re born underdeveloped. They don't open up until they're about 10 days old. “But just by separating them from their mom, you’ve decreased their chance of survival because they need their mom.” Kittens are born with their eyes sealed shut. “It’s really hard for people to see kittens and not want to just scoop them up,” she said. Most of the time their mom will return, she said, so check back periodically. To steer clear of inundating shelters with newborn kittens, Delany’s advice is to leave litters alone unless they’re in immediate danger. But more often than not, the cat is just off looking for food. People who come across a new litter may think that the mother has abandoned her babies, and they take them to a shelter. “Six or seven months out of the year we’re just flooded with these little guys.”įor the most part, it’s a human-made problem, she said. “Kitten season is kind of one of the banes of shelter existence,” said Cynthia Delany, supervising shelter veterinarian at Yolo County Animal Services in Woodland, west of Sacramento. Hatfield fosters pregnant cats and orphaned kittens through the San Francisco-based nonprofit Toni’s Kitty Rescue. This stray cat gave birth to seven kittens in June in Valerie Hatfield's bathroom. March is the beginning of what’s known among shelters as “kitten season.” The flow of kittens doesn’t slow down until November. When the days start getting longer, around January, cats start breeding. The nonprofit covers its expenses through donations and a $62.50 charge to animal services for each kitten it fosters, a fee that covers food, vaccines, heating pads and antibiotics, said Dougherty. “They’re very happy to have our services,” said Dougherty, “because so many shelters have to euthanize.”ĭougherty said that before she opened Kitten Central in 2012, Placer County Animal Services regularly euthanized newborn kittens, a common practice around the country. After the kittens weigh at least 2 pounds and have been spayed and neutered, she returns them to the agency so they can put them up for adoption. Dougherty cares for kittens up to 1 month old, as well as feral and stray cats with litters. Kitten Central receives most of its kittens from Placer County Animal Services. During their first weeks, kittens in foster care need to be bottle-fed every two to four hours, day and night. Penny Dougherty bottle-feeds a 2-week-old kitten she fostered at her house in June. “A lot of people think fostering is taking kittens home and playing with them,” said Penny Dougherty, chief executive director of Kitten Central of Placer County, an animal shelter she runs from her house in Newcastle, California, 30 miles northeast of Sacramento. So researchers and shelters are trying to figure out ways to make it easier. All across the country, volunteer foster parents log many sleepless nights bottle-feeding kittens, which are even more helpless than human babies.

(Josh Cassidy/KQED)īut raising orphaned newborns into healthy, fluffy, frisky 2-month-olds ready to be adopted requires an enormous behind-the-scenes effort. A 5-week-old kitten plays at a shelter run by the Peninsula Humane Society and SPCA in Burlingame, near San Francisco, California. As our location is a little out of the way we are mainly mail order but you are welcome to come and check out our range of items.Every year, hundreds of thousands of kittens end up in animal shelters, in need of permanent homes. As we deliver all over New Zealand we accept Visa/MasterCard and Bank Deposits. We also have Chicken Coops and a range of Poultry Accessories. If it lays eggs people have used our incubators to hatch them, we have even sold one to somebody to hatch crickets in. We sell incubators to people for chickens, ducks, parrots, pheasants, quail, budgies, turtles, finches, breaded dragons, water dragons.

We send incubators all over New Zealand and we export to Australia and the Pacific Islands. We have incubators that will take 3 eggs and incubators that will hold over 1000 eggs. We have basic models for beginners through to top of the range fully automatic incubators for all types of birds and reptiles. Incubators New Zealand Ltd We are New Zealands largest supplier of poultry and bird Incubators.

Kitten incubator