Pastor Larry Vandever, Coalition for Feral Cats of Lehigh Valley (PA)
August 3, 2020
Bonney Brown and Diane Blankenburg, Humane Network
August 11, 2020
Today’s guest post comes to us from Krista Beucler, Marketing & Communications Intern at Community Cats Podcast.
The warmer weather ushers in kitten season, which can last a long time and put a lot of stress on your local shelters and rescues.
Now you’ve found a stray kitten in your backyard. What do you do next? For many of us, our first instinct is to grab that kitten and take it over to an animal shelter. If the kitten is truly abandoned, this may be the best course of action—but if the kitten has a mother who is just away at the moment, you may actually put the kitten in more danger by separating it from its mother. Many shelters aren’t equipped to handle motherless kittens younger than eight weeks who need bottle feeding or possibly an incubator. This results in many young kittens being euthanized in municipal shelters.
So what should you do? Observe the kitten’s behavior: if it’s sleeping peacefully, the mother cat is probably just away and planning on coming back. Check on the kitten every couple of hours. You can sprinkle flour around the kitten and watch for paw prints showing that mom has returned. Once she realizes that you’ve found her nest, she’ll likely move the kitten to a more secure location, so don’t be alarmed if the kitten or kittens disappear.
After observing the kitten periodically for 12–18 hours, if you decide that it does have a mother in the area, just leave them alone and let mama cat do her thing. Then, when the kitten is 6–8 weeks old and starting to eat on its own, it’s time to trap the whole family and bring them to a shelter that does Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR). There, the kitten and mother cat can get spayed/neutered and vaccinated. The kitten can stay at the shelter to be socialized and adopted, while mom can either go back to her colony or be adopted as a working cat.
If, after your observation of the kitten, you notice that it is dirty, meowing, and you haven’t seen the mother cat at all, you can assume it is abandoned. Do some research to find a shelter in your area that can handle young kittens or that can help you find resources to care for the kittens on your own. At 8 weeks, you’ll be able to take the kitten over to the shelter so they can get ready to be adopted.
Originally from Colorado, Krista Beucler received a Bachelor of Arts in creative writing at the University of Mary Washington (UMW) in Virginia. She was the editor-in-chief for Issue 7.2 of the Rappahannock Review, the literary journal published by UMW. Krista’s creative work has been published in From Whispers to Roars literary magazine. She is spending COVID-19 at home with her cats.
