Caring for a feral mother cat and her kittens

A very experienced animal worker was quoted as saying "...for feral cats there may not be a tomorrow." If this warning applies to adult feral cats which have to cope with the hazardous life of a homeless cat, then how much more does it concern young, helpless feral kittens when born in such places as skips, bonfire heaps, under floorboards, in storage rooms or simply under bushes in the open?

There is a slim chance of survival, and even those kittens which are seemingly safely tucked away with their mother in a shed are at everybody's mercy: dogs, foxes, tomcats and even cruel or ignorant humans may at any time discover and harm them. Their mother may for no obvious reason move them to a new hide-out, unknown to her concerned feeders. Young kittens are prone to cat 'flu, which can lead to eye infections, blindness, or to pneumonia and death.

Should the kittens survive the first few weeks they will grow up fast, quickly become unhandleable and within months begin to breed. A female can come into season as early as four months. Our aim is to trap the cats, tame the kittens to be rehomed as domestic pets and neuter and return any adult feral cats to ensure the cycle of breeding is stopped.

To be sure the kittens are safe they have to be rescued as soon as possible. If they are very young, we also trap the mother so she can rear them herself in a special unit which enables us to attend safely to a frightened and potentially aggressive mother cat. The unit is spacious enough for her needs but small enough to give her a feeling of privacy and safety, which helps her to relax.  For abandoned kittens, we take them in and hand rear.

Note: although the cages are pictured outside, they must only be used indoors

Equipment

The hospitalisation basket is 910 mm (36 in) long, 380 mm (15 in) wide and 355 mm (14 in) high. These have a division panel and can be divided into two sections with two top openings that can be used separately: this enables the carer to attend to one section while the cat is securely confined in the other, without ever touching the cat, i.e., for feeding and cleaning the unit.

An additional lift-up end door makes transfer from a trap, queen's cage or other side-opening equipment possible. We advise this door is securely tied with string to prevent a cat from lifting it up and escaping. 

The queen's cage is a little longer 460 mm (18 in). The lift-up end door corresponds with that of the hospitalisation basket so that the two cages can easily be tied together to create extra space.

The rescue 

Whenever possible we secure the mother cat first unless the kittens are in acute danger. Usually a mother cat will leave her nest for a short while to find food, and provided she is unsuspecting will readily walk into a trap which has been baited with very tempting food such as finely chopped cooked chicken or turkey.

The trap should be placed 3-5 metres (10-15 feet) away from the ‘nest’, with a trail of tiny pieces of food leading to the trap. On this occasion the automatic trap seems ideal, because it can be watched from a distance, for instance by a person hiding in the back of a room behind drawn curtains, or in a car. THE TRAP MUST NEVER BE SET AND LEFT UNOBSERVED. 

If other cats approach the trap the brief appearance of a human will usually discourage them. If the mother is part of a nearby colony it is better to use a manually operated trap so that the "unwanted" cats can eat their fill from the trap without springing it. We persevere until the mother is caught. As soon as the mother is caught, the trap must be covered completely with a large sheet or blanket to calm her down and prevent her injuring herself in panic. The kittens can then be collected from the nest and should be put in a separate warm box for the journey home, during which they must not be given to the mother as she may suffocate them in the trap/carrier. 

It is important that any members of the public are told not to feed the cats prior to trapping nor pick up kittens before our arrival. This makes it more difficult to trap the mother who will panic. A mother cat who is a stray, and was not born feral, will usually return sooner. Under no circumstances must the kittens be returned to the nest once they have been picked up, as the mother will either abandon them or else most certainly move them to another hiding-place.

Settling into their new home

At home the kittens are checked over, weighed and named and entered in a book with sex and colour, the start of keeping individual records of treatments and procedures for each kitten; then they are immediately put in in a large box lined with paper in far end of the hospitalisation cage, which becomes the sleeping section. DO NOT USE SOFT BEDDING, too many kittens have either slipped unnoticed behind and under the bedding and suffocated in the folds of the material. Crocheted blankets are death-traps; kittens can easily become entangled in them and died of starvation or suffocation.

Without their mother, the kittens will cry and scramble about in the new box, moving in circles in search of the others’ scent. If the trap/carrier containing the mother is placed against the side opening of the hospitalisation cage she will soon see, smell and hear her kittens and will eagerly join them in the darkened section as soon as the adjacent sliding doors of the hospitalisation cage and trap/carrier are raised. If she does not attend to her kittens instantly, we confine her with them in the sleeping section with the help of the division panel and pull the cover over most of the cage. Contained like this for a while, the mother will soon stop panicking and if she is too frightened to take care of her kittens, they will teach her and they will soon start suckling. Usually, it takes only minutes for a mother cat to settle, provided she is covered up and not disturbed.

In the first few weeks after rescuing, it is important to approach the cage only when necessary and observe the cats from the far end if possible. The cover can be lifted briefly to check on the kittens, but do not raise the lid over the nest section under any circumstances or attempt to touch or stroke the cat. Even a domestic cat, if she is nervous or defensive, can easily escape or attack and injure a person severely.

NEVER LEAVE THE CAGE until you have fastened all the doors (top doors, side opening or division panel). It takes only a second for a determined cat to escape from an insecurely fastened opening.

When kittens have to be handled…

It is quite easy to attend to the cage with the help of the division panel, which safely divides the nesting area off when we need to replace food or litter or clean the cage out. To attend to the kittens while they are still nest-bound, we can separate them from their mother. Initially, we try to entice her into the other section with some nice food or, failing that, we can gently push her with a wooden object (e.g. handle of a cooking spoon) through the cage. Once she is closed in the other section, we can exchange the paper bedding and check the kittens thoroughly, which is important when they are very young. If they are only a few days old and seem unsettled and continuously distressed when feeding, they need to be weighed regularly, to make sure they are all gaining weight. If not, we can offer the bottle to the whole litter and feed the kittens who take to it. Each time we let the mother return to her kittens as soon as possible.

Even if the mother is tame, use the same caution when attending to her kittens. Although it may not be necessary to separate her from them, we can reach the kittens by using the second top opening and access them by lifting the division panel slightly. A contented, tame mother cat will usually not object to handling her kittens. Sturdier kittens may be taken out of the cage for a few minutes and bottle-fed separately, allowing the weaker ones to suckle on the mother without competition. In many cases this type of intervention has saved lives (particularly in their early days, weaker kittens or those conceived towards the end of the 3–5-day mating period rapidly fall behind the others, which grow very fast). Often given up as “the runt”, they will rapidly fade and starve, but if fed and nurtured they will catch up and grow into normal-sized kittens.

As the kittens grow…

When the kittens are about 3 weeks old, we can remove the box from the nest section so the kittens can move around the entire pen. Now (if not already done) we can attach a queen’s cage to the end of the hospitalisation cage to create extra space. By 3-4 weeks the kittens are becoming increasingly interested in human interaction and in the weaning food and kitten milk placed at the end of the cage farthest from the nest, and we handle them a lot, always making sure that the mother is safely separated.

When the kittens are 5-6 weeks old and eating steadily, the mother is spayed and, if feral, ear-tipped and returned to her site. If she is tame, she and her kittens are moved to a bigger cage and are allowed to run around the room at intervals, because they need the exercise and have to become used to moving among people and to being picked up from the floor.

With the exception of a very few cats which simply had no milk at all, feral cats (as well as domestic ones) have always reared their kittens quite contentedly in the conditions described, provided the kittens were very young when rescued and the family left undisturbed. It is advantageous to place the hospitalisation cage in a raised position; this makes attending to the cage easier and it is less frightening for the mother cat only to see the human from waist level, rather than feet and legs, which she has learned to avoid outside.

Procedure if kittens to be rescued are older

If we do not find the kittens until they are at least 4-5 weeks old or older, we raise them without their mother: it is easy to wean them now and they are just the right age for handling and intensive bonding with humans. If left with her much longer they will start imitating her shy attitude. As the mother’s milk production is reducing, her physical urge to nurse her kittens diminishes. At this stage she is therefore less likely to settle with her kittens in captivity. To spare the feral mother stress, as soon as we have secured the kittens we trap her so she can be spayed and returned after being assessed thoroughly just in case she is actually a shy domestic cat who is behaving as if feral because of her recent wild lifestyle and in defence of her kittens. In that case we reunite her with her kittens until all can be found homes when they are old enough.

© Cat Action Trust 1977