Feral kittens - what to do?

nocal

There is a feral cat who likes to have her kittens in my garden. So far she has had one litter this year and is about 3 weeks pregnant.

Her current litter has 4 kittens, 3 of which I have now safely contained. I would put the age of these kittens at 12-16 weeks. It appears as if the adult has left these kittens on their own in the last few days.

So what can I do with these 3 kittens? I would like to give them every possible chance that can be given to them and do not want them to have a miserable existence.

I have checked out cats aid and the dspca but there do not seem to be any viable options there.

If anyone does have any viable options for what to do then please do let me know.
I would also like to point out that they are currently calm and I will do what I can to feed them whilst I have them contained.

The Sweeper

First things first, you need to capture the mother. If you allow her, she'll have litter after litter of kittens in your yard. You need to do trap, neuter, release with her. Call your local shelters and cat rescues, and your vet, and ask them if they have a wire trap. The trap is usually a long wire cage with a pressure plate at the furthest end from the door. You place food at the back of the cage, and when the cat steps on the pressure plate, the cage door drops and traps the cat.

Take the feral cat to the vet in the cage. Do not remove her from the cage. The vet will sedate her in the cage. When sedated, she'll be taken out of the cage and neutered. They can use dissolving stitches. Then they'll place her back in the cage to recover. You can keep her inside for 24 hours in the cage if you wish, until she's well recovered, but then release her back into your yard.

She'll continue to occupy your garden, and hunt mice, but she won't have any more kittens. Her presence will also help to deter other cats from your garden, so the problem will not continue.

For reference of other readers who've searched and found this post, the optimal time to remove feral kittens from their mother is five to six weeks of age. As a guide, a kitten's eyes change colour from blue between four and five weeks of age. If you can capture them between five and six weeks, take them inside your house and shut them into one room. Give them 48 hours to settle, with a good supply of food and water and a litter tray, and minimal contact. After 48 hours you can start to handle them.

Feral kittens will growl, hiss and spit at you. They will also scratch and bite if they get the opportunity - but when they're smaller, the scratching doesn't do much damage (but the biting can - they give quite a pinch). It is recommended you pick them up in a towel initially, and sit them on your lap in the towel, facing away from you. Stroke and rub them gently, then set them down again. Do this with each kitten. Over a number of days, you can increase the time and skip using the towel.

The best tip I have when reaching for a feral or frightened kitten is DO NOT reach with your fingers out. Reach out slowly with your hand held low and your fingers curled loosely inwards. You'd be amazed at the difference in reaction from the kitten.

Now back to your kittens - since they're older, you run more of a risk of injury when handling them, so you'll have to take things more slowly. If you have the kittens contained, you can start to gain their trust through food. If you can get into the containment area with the kittens, you have a lot of opportunity to interact with them. Bring food with you and wait until they're hungry. Sit in the containment area (as close to the ground as you can get, if not on the ground). Speak to the kittens in a low, soothing, sing song voice. Do not make eye contact with them.

Gently throw a piece of food onto the ground near you. Do not react when they come out to get the food, but continue to talk to them. Offer them the next piece of food, held by your relaxed fingertips (they may want to swat it out of your hand and run away with it). Basically get them used to coming close to you with food. Once they approach you comfortably, you can try to touch them. Try gently brushing your hand off them when they're head down in some food.

You can increase your touching until they're comfortable with you and you can then move to full on stroking, picking them up and so on. The first time you try and lift one, don't move it far - while sitting on the floor, for instance, lift the kitten and put it on your lap almost before it's even realised it's been picked up.

This handling will take a lot of time - a few weeks. You can't rush things, and you must never grab a kitten, or pursue them behind something to try and lift them, and so on. Some feral kittens will never adjust from being handled like that. I can't emphasise enough how important it is to get them used to being handled. If they can't be handled, they'll never find a home.

If you cannot rehome the kittens, you will need to have them neutered. If you do not have them neutered, then in six months or less you will have their litters of kittens in your yard as well as their mother's.

Time, patience, human contact, a calm, low voice, no eye contact, and slow movements - and lovely, smelly, yummy food. You'll get there.

MsFifers

Can you handle them at all? If they are tame enough, you might try taking photos of them and advertising on somewhere like irishanimals.ie for a new home for them.

I don't understand what you mean about the rescues you mention - do they not have space for the kittens? You could try phoning around other rescues to see if they can take them in.

Rescues would also usually lend you a cat trap so you could catch the mother and get her neutered so she stops having unwanted kittens.

In the meantime, I'd do my best to ensure the cats become comfortable with being handled. Feed them close to you and pet them if/when they allow.

boomerang

First priority would be to trap mom and get her spayed so it doesn't happen again and again... Would any of your local rescues lend you a humane trap or give you a voucher for subsidised neutering?

At 12-16wks it's gonna be harder to socialise the kits but it's not impossible - it just takes patience and time. They might always be somewhat skittish, though.

I think you're fantastic

morganafay

Would you be able to keep them for a few weeks and tame them and try to find new homes for them?

Narsil

Hi Nocal
Firstly well done for caring for these little ones:)

We had a feral momma with her 6 kittens in our garden last year and we managed to catch two of them.
We spent 2 months taming them down so they could go to my local animal welfare to find homes.One lovely lady took the two of them and they are now happy lap cats:D
We caught the momma cat and the runt of the litter and neutered them both and now they live permanently in our garden and are now part of our family

I would suggest taming these kittens as much as you can and fostering them until your local rescue has space for them.

I would also try and trap the momma and get her neutered as quick as possible before she has the next litter. You could borrow a trap from your local rescue and check out your local vet/ISPCA for subsidised neutering for ferals. Ours cost €25-30 each.

It broke my heart letting our two foster kittens go, but to hear of the great home they got made it all worthwhile:)

Very best of luck with it all:)

mymo

Keep feeding them and try to stroke them while they're waiting for food or eating, if you can tame them enough to handle them, try putting a post in the rehoming thread.
Maybe try to get a lone of a cat trap from one of the charities and get the mother neutered, you can release her again after.

nocal

Just to update this and to give information to anyone else who does a search as to what can be done.

The dspca will neuter kittens when they get to 6 months old. I could not put them over 5 months so they would not neuter/spay them. The dspca are completely full at the moment so they could not take them.

It is likely that when I first saw them they were about 4 weeks old. Mothers tend to be extremely protective of their cats up until then. From what I can gather kittens tend to have blue eyes up until about 5-6 weeks old so that is a good way of putting an early age on them. They can be weaned off their mothers milk from about 8 weeks on.

If anyone plans to catch any feral kittens then check with the DSPCA first to see if they have space and if not then plan to catch them at 6 months of age. This could take about 3-4 months of feeding but a relationship of sorts can be built up with them during that time.

Finally it is possible to either buy or rent humane traps from www.pet-bliss.com or else your local vet might put you in contact with a local who has traps.

If anyone has any more information or more accurate information then please do add.
For now the kittens are back out roaming around and if I can contain them in about 8 weeks time then I will have them sorted out.

nocal

Thanks for all the replies guys - obviously I had not seen them before posting my last reply.

I will re-start the gaining the trust route if possible and yes the absolute priority is to capture and release the mother cat. That is the hardest part though. She is not as desperate for food as the kittens and if she does not get it easily enough then she quite happily does without and goes off and finds something somewhere. Even when the kittens were being well fed she would still come back with excess food for them.

If she were to see her kittens entering a trap then she would steer well clear of it. She is a survivor no doubt about it. The most annoying part of all of this is that the only Toms that I saw sniffing around her when she was last in heat were definitely someones pets - you could tell by their size, mannerisms and general state of well-being.

Anyway there is some great advice in the replies - advice that I had not been able to find by searching previous threads. Good to have it all together so hopefully it will appear in future searches and others can be better prepared than I was.

I have not given up yet and am pretty sure that I can regain the kittens trust over the coming weeks. So at least I should be able to get them neutered and spayed and return them to their happy existence in my back garden.

The Sweeper

Hey Nocal

Don't be too worried about the mum seeing her kittens in a trap. Cats don't learn from pack experience the way dogs do. A mother cat will not be put off a trap by seeing one of her kittens captured in it. Cat brains don't seem to work that way. A cat's learning curve is set almost entirely by its own personal experiences. If the trap springs while her kitten is in it, and her nose is centimetres from the door, the experience of the door closing in her face will put her off. However she won't make the connection between the kitten going in the trap, getting caught, and being taken away, and think 'That could happen to me'. If you reset the trap, with no kittens around, and she's hungry, she'll go in to ge the food.

A cat that has been trapped once is difficult to trap again, but that's because of its own personal experience.

(It's a cat thing. Two cats can sit, petrified, while I vacuum the house and a third cat pounces fearlessly on the head of the vacuum cleaner as I push it around. The terrified ones won't learn bravery from the fact that nothing bad happens to the third, and the third one won't learn fear of the vacuum from the terrified ones, because his own experience tells him that it's fun and it won't hurt him. On the same basis, a street-savvy adult cat will not teach road sense to a kitten, and when you're handling a bunch of ferals, just because one walks up to you that doesn't mean the others will realise you're nothing to be scared of.)

Graces7

nocal wrote: »

Thanks for all the replies guys - obviously I had not seen them before posting my last reply.

I will re-start the gaining the trust route if possible and yes the absolute priority is to capture and release the mother cat. That is the hardest part though. She is not as desperate for food as the kittens and if she does not get it easily enough then she quite happily does without and goes off and finds something somewhere. Even when the kittens were being well fed she would still come back with excess food for them.

If she were to see her kittens entering a trap then she would steer well clear of it. She is a survivor no doubt about it. The most annoying part of all of this is that the only Toms that I saw sniffing around her when she was last in heat were definitely someones pets - you could tell by their size, mannerisms and general state of well-being.

Anyway there is some great advice in the replies - advice that I had not been able to find by searching previous threads. Good to have it all together so hopefully it will appear in future searches and others can be better prepared than I was.

I have not given up yet and am pretty sure that I can regain the kittens trust over the coming weeks. So at least I should be able to get them neutered and spayed and return them to their happy existence in my back garden.

You are doing well, wonderfully well. And yes, build up trust rather than cold-trap. Kinder.

cyphastrea

Hi, is anybody in or around Galway interested in helping stray and feral cats.
I would like to start a group for TNR (trap, neutering and return).
Mayo cat rescue have been doing this for years and could give advice.
Something has to be done. There is so many kittens out there without a chance.

nocal

Update:
since releasing the 3 captured kittens I have not seen them since. I have been working on the remaining one and gaining her trust. She will let me pet her when she is eating (but is not overly fond of it) and she will come just inside the back door and sleep on a mat - but if I go near her she leaves.

Yesterday she was looking amazingly well groomed and then today when I came home from work she runs up looking for food. I was making a cup of tea and was on the phone when - her mother comes up, grabs her by the neck and removes her from beside the back door. This happened a few times while I was on the phone.

So I got the food and fed the kitten - the mother watched - at the beginning I thought she was going to attack me - but one click of the fingers and she stayed her distance. The mother was miaow-ing at the kitten.

So the mother having avoided this kitten for the last 3 weeks (and at times she was close by and the kitten would call for her) is back - and is 3-4 weeks shy of producing another litter. If anyone can explain the current behaviour of the adult cat then I would greatly appreciate it.

Graces7

nocal wrote: »

Update:
since releasing the 3 captured kittens I have not seen them since. I have been working on the remaining one and gaining her trust. She will let me pet her when she is eating (but is not overly fond of it) and she will come just inside the back door and sleep on a mat - but if I go near her she leaves.

Yesterday she was looking amazingly well groomed and then today when I came home from work she runs up looking for food. I was making a cup of tea and was on the phone when - her mother comes up, grabs her by the neck and removes her from beside the back door. This happened a few times while I was on the phone.

So I got the food and fed the kitten - the mother watched - at the beginning I thought she was going to attack me - but one click of the fingers and she stayed her distance. The mother was miaow-ing at the kitten.

So the mother having avoided this kitten for the last 3 weeks (and at times she was close by and the kitten would call for her) is back - and is 3-4 weeks shy of producing another litter. If anyone can explain the current behaviour of the adult cat then I would greatly appreciate it.

Would think hormones... I once had to rescue a white cat from a pregnant ewe. She thought it was her unborn lamb and was trying to save it from me... She will be fine once the kittens are born.