An Ultimate Kitten Care Guide
Want to raise a happy kitten? To have a nice and cute kitten, you need a complete kitten care guide that lets you do ideal care.
Raising a kitten is entirely different from any other pet care. The reason is, besides their personal needs, grooming, and social development is the biggest challenge.
How To Take Care Of A Kitten
To help you do perfect kitten parenting, I’ll be sharing “A to Z” on how to take care of a kitten. So, stop worrying and sail for a quick read to bring up an ideal kitten.
Key Steps For Raising A Kitten
1. Make a List of Kitten Supplies
Before you get a kitten, make preparation first.
Kitten not less than a baby. So, when you’d decide to bring a kitten home, it’s essential to arrange necessary supplies first. These supplies include:
- Kitten food (advised by the veteran)
- Litter box/ sandbox
- A cat bed
- Dishes for food and water
- Cat scratching post
- Cat toys
- Grooming supplies: cat brush (ideally a slicker brush), shampoo, flea comb, nail trimmer
- Toothbrush
- Ear wipes
- Cat grooming gloves
- Collar and ID tag
- Cat carrier
Once you’ve got the kitten supplies, you can look forward to bringing a kitten to your home.
2. Make Your Home Safe For Your Kitten’s Arrival
Going to bring the abundance of cuteness at home? First, make sure that your home is safe for your kitten.
Why?
Kittens are great explorers because of their curious nature. Therefore, they can poke their nose in everything soon — from plants to buckets.
There can be many hazards and potentially poisonous items at your home like:
- Some specific plants — lily and tulips are deadly.
- Human foods including alcohol, chocolates, caffeine, etc.
- Insecticides, herbicides, and pesticides
- Any chewable toxic material or item
So, you can keep all potentially dangerous things in a safer place to make your home kitten friendly.
3. Get An Appointment With A Veteran
Before getting your fluffy baby, it’s essential to schedule a visit to a veteran. It’ll educate you about the health of your kitten. Your first visit at veteran can help you with:
- Getting advice for your kitten’s food;
- Examining your kitten for disease and other skin issues, besides fleas;
- Vaccinating your kitten.
Hence, a visit to a veteran will ensure that your new family member brings no illness to your family or your other pets.
4. Microchip Your Kitten Or Put On A Collar
You love your kitten like your baby, and you never want to miss it! Therefore, you must do micro-chipping, which is more convenient and safer. Or, you can put a collar on your kitten with its registered ID tag.
If you want to go for a collar, the suitable age for collaring your kitten is “as soon as possible.” The earlier collaring will be helpful to let your kitten adopt the band around its neck.
5. Provide Your Kitten With Its First Safe Place
Once bought at home, the foremost part of kitten care is to give it a safer territory. The reason is, the kittens usually take hours to a week to adapt to the new place — even months in case they’re shy.
To help them adjust, you can keep them in any small but comfortable space in your home, like any small room, or washroom. Since the kittens are shy, they need a place to hide into. For this purpose, you can put any cardboard box or cat bed with a blanket there.
Once it feels comfortable, it’ll look for exploring the home on its own. So, let it leave its palace and have fun around. Similarly, for the good social development of your kitten, it’s also necessary not to pick it, but wait until it comes to you itself.
6. Feed Your Kitten With Proper Nutrition
Are you a vegetarian or vegan? Your kitten will never care about it. So, the first thing to remember is that your kitten will need non-veg food to live. As an inevitable part of knowing how to raise a kitten, you must see what to feed your kitten with.
Remember:
- Don’t force your kitten to eat. When you bring your kitten home, it takes up to 12 hours to let it rely on food from you.
- Mostly the kittens from a shelter are already in their weaning period. So, you can introduce it to its food in dishes. But don’t push it to eat food.
- For an abandoned kitten of below 8 weeks, your veteran will advise you with a kitten care guide week by week, to help its feeding needs.
- How often to feed your kitten? The instructions on kitten food packaging will guide you. Yet, pick quality digestible cat food to provide enough nutrition, proteins, and fatty acids to your kitten.
- Never try to feed your kitten with milk as a replacement for cat milk, food, or water. Similarly, milk cannot replace water — your kitten can suffer from dehydration.
With some care about your kitten’s food, you can help it grow healthily.
7. Kitten Sleeping Pattern
How to put your new kitten to sleep? It’s tricky for the first night. Yet, if you try since the beginning, you can train your kitten for bed easily. You can place the kitten bed in its haven.
Warmth wins confidence!!! So, to make the kitten’s bed cozy, you can place a cat mat and a blanket. You can place the toys and scratch post as well in your kitten’s bed.
Place the litter box, food, and water supply, to give your kitten a homely feeling, which will let it settle sooner. Thus, by and by your kitten will love its bed.
8. Train Your Kitten For The Toilet
How to train your kitten for the toilet? Proper litter training lets you enjoy peace of mind forever. As the kittens are naturally in a habit of hiding their business, you’ll find the toilet training easier. Yet, you must start the training as soon as you get your kitten at home.
For this purpose, place the fresh litter box near your kitten in its haven or kennel. Make sure you clean the litter box regularly, with no delay. It’ll make your kitten love cleanliness.
9. Kitten Grooming
A cute and clean kitty is a gift. Therefore, our kitten care guide is incomplete without letting you know how to groom your kitten. As soon as your kitten trusts you, you can start the grooming by following some basic tips:
- Brush your kitten’s skin regularly to keep its skin clean from cat shedding.
- Though twice a week bathing is essential, a routine dry bath can also be more favorable. For this purpose, you can spray your kitten with a mixture of vinegar and water and do a towel dry.
- Kittens have soft nails. So, you can clip your kitten’s nail twice a month.
- Teeth brushing is inevitable for the oral care of your kitten to prevent future dental problems. So, you can begin the brushing, once your kitten gets its adult teeth by the age of 5-6 months. In the beginning, you can first use a rubber applicator to let your kitten become habitual.
10. Socialize Your Kitten
A happy kitten is your primary goal of kitten care. The reason is a playful, loving kitten is a cheerful member of your family and other pets at your home.
Can you know you have successfully raised a socialized kitten? Yes, if you put your kitten in the carrier it doesn’t get offended, it’s your win.
So, you train your kitten socially by following these bits of advice.
- Never force your kitten: neither for food nor for grooming.
- Whenever your kitten does what you want it to do, give it a treat.
- Let your kitten roam about and play with toys.
- Spend some time, playing with your kitten regularly. Let the family members also play with it.
- Socialization is a grand idea. So, introduce your kitten to every visitor and let them talk to it.
- When handling your kitten initially, hold toys in your hand to let your kitten bite on them. This way, it’ll not scratch or bite your hand.
- Allow your kitten to play with other pets at your home. You can begin with the safer pets.
- Take your kitten outdoors often in its carrier.
- Schedule some regular outdoor visits, riding your kitten in your car with its carrier.
Some More Tips For Raising A Kitten
A healthy, happy, and jolly furry is your goal. So, I’ll share some more kitten care basics to help you know how to take care of a kitten perfectly.
Let’s look at our tips for raising a kitten.
- Carry on the diet the kitten has been getting at the shelter, before switching on a new diet.
- Neutering is highly advisable to prevent unwanted pregnancy and behavioral change in your kitten. So, do the neutering before 4 months of age.
- It’s common that a kitten might bite or scratch you, In such a case instead of showing aggression, try to understand its behavior.
- If your kitten does something annoying, be calm, and see the reason behind it. Thus, you’ll control wisely.
In Short,
Parenting a kitten is equal to raising your child. Yet, watchful care can let you enjoy cuddling your kitten. Feeding, resting, playing, scratching, and love are what your kitten demands from you. By maintaining an optimum supply, you can help it grow.
By following our kitten care guide, you’ll surely raise your kitten. But, among your cat lover friends and family members, with whom are you going to share this ultimate guide?
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