Raw for 4 week old kitten?

[cprcheetah]

I am raising a 4 week old kitten whom on Friday came into the vet clinic I work at and couldn't even lift her head, she is literally 1/4 the size of her littermates.  We gave her dextrose and started giving her a/d and milk replacer and she perked right up.  She is doing pretty good all things considered.  She weighs 7oz now.  She is super tiny.  However I think she prefers the raw over the canned food as twice now she has stolen my big cats raw and eaten quite a bit of it.  Is it okay to feed this to her so young?  And so small?  Any special considerations I need to make for a growing kitten?  It has been determined that she is probably going to be a 'mini' sized kitty so probably won't get very big.  Here she is eating DeeJay's dinner lol.  That paper plate is one of the SMALL ones that is truly how small she is.  I use the Catinfo.org boneless recipe for my cats with eggshells added for calcium.

  

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• cprcheetah
• Mar 30, 2014

 

[furmonster mom]

I've not actually had the experience of feeding raw to kittens, but I seem to recall folks saying it's the same basic ratio, and to essentially to let them have as much as they can handle.  They are likely to eat a lot of small meals throughout the day and that adds up, but hey, they're growing, right?

I do also seem to remember (from many years back) somebody adding extra calcium to their puppy's diet... but that was for a big dog breed.  So, not sure if that would correlate with kittens or not.

 

[Willowy]

Wild mama cats feed their babies raw . If she's physically able to eat it I don't see any reason not to let her.

One thing to consider if you won't be keeping her is to try to get her to eat every kind of food, to spare her new owners the trouble of a cat who won't eat what they serve.

I wouldn't guarantee that she's a "mini cat"---I took in 2 kittens who were badly malnourished, they weighed 8 ounces at 8 weeks! So small. And they stayed small for quite a while, it was maybe 8-9 months before they started getting big. But now they're both big healthy cats, weighing around 9-10 pounds. So she could catch up!

 

[isabel53]

Hi, This is my 1st post on this site.

This is a cautionary tale.

I am a cat breeder and have been feeding raw rabbit for 10 years now to adults and kittens alike to no ill effects. However, due to  diminishing supplies from the supplier I was using I have switched to raw lamb. The adult cats were absolutely fine eating it but when I began feeding the kittens at 5 weeks by 6 weeks of age they all developed diarrhoea but no sickness. The vet said that the lamb probably had a higher bacterial content than the rabbit which the younger kittens couldn't deal with. The problem was soon cleared up with a course of antibiotics but since then I have been cooking the lamb. This is very easy though and just means I blast it for about 2 mins in the microwave for 2 tablespoons of lamb. The kittens love it and wolf it down. They are doing well on it too, the boys weighing over 2kg at 13 weeks and the girls weighing 1650g.

You may consider cooking the raw food whilst they kitten is small (and allowing to cool of course) before you end up with a similar problem.

 

[cprcheetah]

Thanks for the heads up but I prefer raw, as cooking destroys the nutrients they need from it, for now she is just going to eat chicken.