Suggestions for Telling Kittens Apart

[ColoradoCat]

Hello all,

My foster cat just had six (SIX, we were expecting four) kittens and five of them look to be mostly identical tabbies. Does anyone have any suggestions for telling kittens apart, or a brand they'd recommend for whelping collars?

 

[Maurey]

The kitten lady recommends using lipstick, as even breakaway collars can pose a risk in very young kittens. Here is a video on the topic :>

 

[lutece]

Personally I just look very closely at all of the kittens and try to notice the small differences. Females vs males, long tail vs short tail, lighter color vs darker, fuzzier coat vs flatter coat, etc. Tabby patterns usually have slight differences too. I write notes in the file where I am keeping their weights. Since I usually weigh them daily (or twice daily in the first week), the weights also tend to give me hints. It doesn't take long before I can recognize each kitten easily.

 

[Sarthur2]

You can put a tiny dab of nail polish or sharpie marker on the tip of the tail.

 

[gilmargl]

I've fostered 5 black kittens (all female, the one male had a few white hairs!). As there was no mother cat, different colored nail polish helped at first - but they hated the smell and as they grew more boisterous it soon rubbed off.

My eyesight is not too good so 4 tabbies (and on another occasion, 5 tabbies with white) were more of a problem. The mother cat would remove nail varnish very quickly. Knowing that their stripes were not identical (varying from dark to light), it was still impossible to line up kittens in order to determine the order of shades of gray.

Sometimes the colors of their paw pads (dark or pink) or nose markings can help. If all else fails, I find a younger person, with good eyesight, to help me write down all the characteristics we can find (distance between ears, length of tall, stray white hairs, anything where there could be differences between them. (This list has to be updated - even a small black spot on a pink nose can disappear!)

I have only once delivered a wrong kitten to its new home - not entirely my fault. The people adopting two kittens had visited me on more than one occasion and had picked out the kittens they wanted. I dealt mostly with the woman and delivered her 2 kittens. Sometime later, when the daughter examined the kittens, she discovered that one of the kittens she'd chosen was not there. Pinky, the one which had one dark spot on her pink paw pads, front left, was still with me. It was fortunately not too late to make an exchange and keep the little girl happy!

 

[ColoradoCat]

Thanks for all the suggestions, everyone! The four tabbies definitely have distinctions that should make telling them apart easier. The two little panthers are probably going to confuse me the most, and the little tuxie is easy enough to tell apart from his siblings. (Yes, that adds up to seven. There was another one in there.)