Kitten Season is here: What to do right meow
By: Brittney Schering
Summary: Cat Lady was not on my bingo card... until my dog found a litter of kittens under the deck in our backyard.
I sat down on a sunny afternoon - well, it looked sunny there in Southern California; still a tad blustery here in Michigan, where the season hasn’t quite landed on what day it is yet… Anywho, I was so excited to meet with Deborah Felin-Magaldi, Board Director for Helen Sanders CatPAWS.
A few weeks ago, my very sweet, loving, gentle rescue dog, Frida, was acting funny out back - peering around the corner of the steps that lead from the deck to the yard. She wouldn’t budge - just staring, almost in awe. What the heck captivated her so significantly? Well, it turned out to be a fresh litter of kittens living snug as bugs right under her nose - and our deck!
You’ve got to kitten me, I thought. While my dog Frida just turned 12, and I’ve had her since 2014, I have no idea how to be a cat mom. And quite frankly, Cat Lady was not on my bingo card. Alas…
Here we are, staring in awe together, Frida and me, and a family of cats living under our deck.
So very thankfully, Deborah took the time to meet with me to answer this one burning question:
What the heck do we do next?
First, she shared how far back she goes with cats - which was basically all the way back, having had cats her whole life. (Already I’m aware that she knows much more than I do about how to care for these cute little creatures.) Twenty years ago, Deborah was working from home with some flexibility and time on her side, so she started to foster kittens for a local shelter. Eventually, she learned how to do bottle feeding for kittens that weren’t yet eating on their own.
In late 2008, early 2009, she got involved with a group that was taking care of the remaining members of a colony of cats near the beach that were still alive in the wake of Helen Sanders’ death in 2005 - which would become the namesake of where she is now with HS CatPAWS. So in 2009, Deborah offered to do the IRS paperwork to make the group into a formal 501c3.
The first bit of advice she gave was to find a chart. Go online: “How old is my kitten?” and check out the pictures to match your cat to the age that most mirrors its features. She reassures that once you do this a few times, it’s pretty easy to decipher a newborn kitten with eyes yet to open, ears still folded all the way down, weighing in at about four ounces, from a cat that’s four weeks old with ears starting to perk up, and so on.
So my next question is, what about when the mother cat is still present?
As in the case of the kittens under my deck, the mom cat was still very much in the picture, also living under my deck.
“If the mother is there, and assuming that it is relatively safe, and the mother looks good and the kittens look good, the prevailing wisdom is to leave them be. Watch them; monitor them, but leave them be, and take care of mom,” Deborah shared.
She also suggested, depending on the weather and the elements, the idea of making a shelter for the mom cat. Plenty of cat shelter ideas can be found online for these free-roaming cats.
Trapping Mom for the TMVR
“Now, once the kittens do start eating on their own, if mom is adoptable, yay, if you can trap her and she is reasonably friendly. Even if she is not, she should be trapped and fixed once the kittens are weaned," she said.
When asked about contacting the humane society for help with this step, Deborah hesitated. She said it really depends on your area. It may or may not be advisable, and some are not as progressive as others. Low-cost spay/neuter is the way to go.
“At a minimum, get mom fixed,” she said.
You may have seen a cat with the top of their ear clipped off. This is the universal sign, known as ear-tipping, to indicate that a cat has been fixed.
Trap-Neuter-Return
Even if you have no intention of keeping mom around as your newfound cat, the hope here is that you can go ahead and get her fixed so she won’t continue to have more litters of kittens.
TMVR - “The V stands for Vaccinate,” she said. “So, trap, neuter, vaccinate, and return - that way they’re vaccinated against what is commonly called distemper, and also rabies.”
Deborah shared exactly how it works at CatPAWS. “When people bring in cats in traps that are called community cats or free-roaming, in other words, no one particularly owns them, we fix them, vaccinate them, clip the ear, and put them back in the trap,” she explained. “The person takes care of them for a day or so to make sure they are recovering, and then they are let back into their environment, which is the Return part.”
If the mom cat is friendly and adoptable, try to network and find her a home.
“Ideally, once the kittens are weaned, they should be able to be fostered and adopted. The idea is to socialize them. Get them used to humans, and get them used to handling. So even if mom is feral as it were, the kittens don’t have to be,” she said.
Sometimes, she shares that even the smallest, newest of kittens just get it from their mama.
“Kittens born to a free-roaming or feral, as sometimes we say, mom - can become themselves, feral and unsocialized very quickly,” she said. “Faster than you think.”
She shared how she’s had five-week-old kittens just hissing and spitting at her already.
“They can be turned around at that age, but if it goes on even a few weeks longer, it can make a real difference in being able to socialize them to the point of adoptability, or not,” she said.
“If it goes on too much longer, the cat becomes not-adoptable, and they will be, unfortunately, doomed to that same free-roaming life, which is a difficult life,” Deborah shared.
“The preference would be to get them into a home,” she said. “The idea is to intervene with the kittens, and get them socialized during that window in which that can be done, so that they can live a different life.”
