Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [90]
If the cat has called on us to oversee the birth, usually all we need to offer is encouragement, kind words, and as much calm as we can muster. Once in a while there’s trouble. When the kitten starts to come forth, whether front-end first or back, it should keep on coming. If it seems to have gotten stuck, clip your fingernails off short, wash your hands and grease them with Vaseline or butter or whatever’s handy, and ease it slowly and gently out, holding the shoulders, not the head, and moving it out and downward from the mother’s tail.
Kittens are born enclosed in a membrane like plastic wrap, and the mother’s supposed to bite and lick this off their faces so they can breathe. If she seems confused and doesn’t, break it yourself with your fingernails, swab the mucus out of the mouth, and perhaps give it a bit of a rub with a clean, soft cloth, all without moving it away from the mother. Watching you, she’ll get the idea, and the kitten will mew for her, and she’ll take over to finish the job.
She will eat the afterbirth. Don’t recoil; this is important for hygienic and probably physiological reasons. She’ll clean up the kittens and gather them to nurse, and purr. Bring her a snack and a bowl of water and tell her what a fine, brave cat she is. Replace the stained papers or old dish towels with something soft and go to bed. Quite likely in the morning you’ll find one or two more kittens than you thought you had. They often pause in delivery like this; it’s been suggested that in case some predator kills the first group, she’ll have time to escape to a safer place and deliver another. Or it may just be that the double-lobed feline uterus empties itself one lobe at a time. Don’t count your kittens before morning.
Sometimes there’s a kitten refused. It may be the smallest and feeblest, or it may look perfectly all right to us but for some reason not to her. If it seems obviously sickly, maybe the best thing is just to let it slip away in its first hours, probably not suffering much, still deaf and blind, a marginal organism at best. If it looks healthy, we can have a try at changing her mind. Warm it with a hair dryer and a heating pad. Pick up a couple of the wanted kittens and mix them in our hands together with the unwanted one and then put them all back to feed; perhaps she won’t be able to sort out the one she didn’t want. If she still won’t have it, and if we’re enormously patient and stubborn, we can raise it as an orphan.
Sometimes something happens to the mother and we have a whole litter of orphans on our hands. And sometimes, cats being a queer bunch, she simply doesn’t want her kittens at all. My sister’s Mehitabel had her name before she had her kittens, but it was well chosen; she didn’t like kittens. Maybe she’d been hoping for boys; she had no use for females. She refused to nurse them, and when people held her down and tried to feed her to them forcibly she hissed and slapped them, and wriggled free and ran away. When they peeped lonesomely for her, she left the house. Judy raised them on an eyedropper, but Mehitabel can’t stand them even now they’re grown.
The original Mehitabel, Don Marquis’s, observes cheerily that she has left her kittens in an abandoned garbage can where they will surely drown if it rains before she gets back.
Orphan kittens need the warmest place in the house, and a heating pad or a heat lamp. When their eyes start to open they need a dab of antibiotic ophthalmic ointment from the vet to take the place of maternal licking. They need help in defecating, a gentle massage with a warm, damp cotton swab or washcloth after each meal. They need our touching and handling. Most of all they need food, and they need it almost all the time. Pet stores carry a pet nurser, a specially designed plastic bottle more practical than the traditional eyedropper. Pet stores or the vet can sell us KMR (Kitten Milk Replacer), which