05/10/2021
THREE WEEK OLD KITTENS UPDATE.
Lots of milestones have been reached this week. At this age both litters of kittens are up on their feet and taking their first wobbly steps. Apart from learning how to walk - and run and inevitably fall over, at this age their first teeth are starting to appear at the front of their mouth. These teeth are not designed to eat meat, but designed for grooming. Their hearing has now matured dramatically, and they are able to respond to sound and become a lot more interactive. They are now showing the very first little signs of play behaviour. Their body temperature should be around 37 degrees Celsius at this age and as they are still not able to completely self thermoregulate, they still need a heat source and an ambient temperature around 24 degrees.
Their eyesight has improved dramatically and their pupils are able to dilate, responding to light and images around them, it still has a long way to go before maturity. It is important to note, that a Cats eyesight is very different from ours. They don’t have as sharp a focus on still objects and don’t see as broad a range of colours as we do. Their eyes are geared up to catch pray and see fast moving objects. In opposition to humans, cats have a high concentration of rod receptors and a low concentration of cone receptors in their retina. A higher concentration of rod receptions accounts for their ability to see well in the dark. They also have a wider field of vision or peripheral vision than humans, but miss out on sharp focus at a distance. Their colour perception is said to be similar to someone who has red green colour blindness.
Their weight should be between 350 and 450 grams and they are now feeding every 4 to 5 hours, giving both mums a break to sit on laps, play and smooch. But they also don’t need as much sleep and are awake a lot more often after every meal, and will cry out for mum when they wander out of the nest and struggle to find their way back to their litter mates. They get there eventually. They are too big for mum to carry safely for any distance at this stage, so all she can do is drag them some of the way and call out for them and wait for them to stumble after her.
They are still totally reliant upon milk and also still need stimulation from mum to go to the toilet, but they will begin to have their own toilet ‘accidents’ in the nest. Although some people begin to wean kittens at 3 weeks, the villi in the intestinal lining of their gut is still developing and they are not biologically ready to absorb the caloric needs found in solid food. Their digestive enzymes also still haven’t made the shift to properly breakdown and absorb the nutrients from solid food either, so I generally wean at 5 weeks of age or when the kitten has enough coordination to seek, find, chew and swallow without any assistance.
This is the age where the real hard work begins for me. Although we know genetically, temperament is passed on to kittens by the father, effective socialisation is paramount to a kittens successful development to settle into a human household. Back in the 80s, Dr Eileen Karsh from Temple University was the first to embark on research which suggested the crucial age to socialise kittens is from 2 to 7 weeks. If socialisation was delayed until after this period, Cats demonstrated behaviour which suggested they were much more fearful and less trusting of humans.
