Yesterday a man brought a box of five kittens to The Cube--they were less than two hours old. One still had the placenta attached to it; their mother died (cause unknown) before she could chew it off and eat it.
We managed to stabilize the kittens and by the time the clinic was done they were sound asleep, having learned how to take KMR from both bottles and syringes. They were transported to the home of a volunteer who has the time to care for bottle-feeders.
This isn't the first time I've seen kittens this young. When I first started out a neighbor brought me a newborn kitten not even a day old--the umbilical cord was still attached. Unfortunately he died within 48 hours.
At another clinic years ago a vet decided to retrieve the kittens from the birth canal of a cat--she was delivering as she was put under anesthesia for spay surgery. The kittens were removed from their fetal sacs and cleaned off; in the end only two of the five survived and the vet swore she would not do that again.
Normally we do spay/abort surgery on pregnant cats. The initial anesthesia usually kills the unborn kittens and the vet just removes them along with the uterus. In very advanced pregnancies the fetal kittens actually survive the surgery but are usually euthanized by injection.
Once we had five fetal kittens from a cat that was minutes away from giving birth; the ICU crew decided that they wanted to try to save them. One survived, the rest died. "Lucky" is a Cube favorite--he visits us often. He doesn't much care for cat food but is an absolute fiend for pretzels....
We managed to stabilize the kittens and by the time the clinic was done they were sound asleep, having learned how to take KMR from both bottles and syringes. They were transported to the home of a volunteer who has the time to care for bottle-feeders.
This isn't the first time I've seen kittens this young. When I first started out a neighbor brought me a newborn kitten not even a day old--the umbilical cord was still attached. Unfortunately he died within 48 hours.
At another clinic years ago a vet decided to retrieve the kittens from the birth canal of a cat--she was delivering as she was put under anesthesia for spay surgery. The kittens were removed from their fetal sacs and cleaned off; in the end only two of the five survived and the vet swore she would not do that again.
Normally we do spay/abort surgery on pregnant cats. The initial anesthesia usually kills the unborn kittens and the vet just removes them along with the uterus. In very advanced pregnancies the fetal kittens actually survive the surgery but are usually euthanized by injection.
Once we had five fetal kittens from a cat that was minutes away from giving birth; the ICU crew decided that they wanted to try to save them. One survived, the rest died. "Lucky" is a Cube favorite--he visits us often. He doesn't much care for cat food but is an absolute fiend for pretzels....
