Learn what to do when your kitten wont eat or drink and understand what is happening with your pet.

Why your kitten doesn’t have thirst nor appetite

Although there could be many reasons why,
the solutions to get it eating are all the same. Let’s think kitty for now:

• some kittens just are fuzzy, our Siamese kitten in particular
• some are stressed out after been "kidnapped" away from their mother, stressreduces appetite
• some pets only touch the food their previous owner was giving to them
• some don’t know what food is, especially the ones that are taken away from their mother too early

What to do?

When you just got your kitten, try to make it at least stressed as possible. Give your kitten a room to herself shut off from the rest of the house with food and water and a litter box.

• Find out from the previous owner what they were feeding.
• Mostly kittens prefer wet food to dry food, so if you only have wet food, then make it mushy adding some water.
• Some pets still need to learn what food is. Mix the wet food with a little bit of water and try putting a little bit in his mouth by the gum. Try putting a bit of canned food on his nose and see if he licks it off. After tasting the food, your kitten might want more.
• Some baby cats will be ok when you bottle feed them wet food with water.
• Buy kitten milk from your pet shop when the animal is not weaned properly yet.
• Try getting Purina Kitten Chow in the yellow bag. Some people call it kitty candy. Try softening some in a little warm water until soft. Leave in the water so it will have a crunchy flavor.

Your last resort: try Hills A/D wet prescription diet, I call it cat miracle food.

What not to do?

If your kitten is less than 6 months old: don’t feed it any dairy products, don’t feed your kitten regular milk: it is really bad for your kitten’s digestive system.

Summary

Most kittens won’t eat for the first 24 hours when you bring them home. They are stressed and trying to learn the new environment. If your kitten wont eat or drink after 2 days, call your vet or an experienced kitten lover.

Things you can do at home the first 48 hours when your cat wont eat. After 48 hours not eating, do go and see your vet immediately.

My advice is based on our own experience. When I came back from holiday and picked up my cat from the pet care hotel, she didn’t want to eat anymore. We all know that cats don’t drink that much, but when an obese cat like mine stops eating all together, it’s twice alarming for her cat health:

1. because any time your cat stops eating, something is wrong
2. fat cats start using up their fat when not eating, which leads to death caused by fatty liver disease.

First we thought our cat was healthy but only grumpy because we dropped her of at the pet hotel for 2 weeks. So we gave her some extra loving care but nothing changed.

• We noticed our cat going into hiding mode, only to pretend very healthy when a family member dropped by. This is typical cat behavior: they retreat when they are sick but when they are spotted, they will pretend that they are as healthy as ever as a surviving tactic not to get attacked by other predators.
• We also noticed that her fur looked a but strange and that she had a little wound on top of her head.

So we took our cat to the vet.

Luckily our vet is a real cat lover, so she noticed on the spot that the wound was a bite-mark of another cat.

After more examination, the vet found some critters in our cat’s fur and our cat’s skin was reacting in an allergic manner to the critters.

She prescribed antibiotics and gave us a can of Hills A/D prescription diet food. Reason that our cat was no more eating was the amount of stress she had undergone: attacked, out of her usual environment and allergy to the critters.

As usual, our cat couldn’t resist the A/D food but for sure we are not going to put our cat at that particular pet care hotel anymore.

Enjoy a garden free of stray cats: make or grow your own free homemade cat repellent.

Best Natural Cat Repellent: Keep your garden secure

The first line to repel cats is to ensure that your garden boundaries are secure. Any gaps in your fence should be blocked to deny low level access.

Cats can jump and climb at a certain extend on vertical walls, so fix a string some 15 cm or 6 inches
above the top of your fence to deter cats from approaching this way.

Natural Homemade cat repellents

By far the easiest homemade natural cat repellent is male urine. Why? Because when cats, dogs and even foxes smell that another possibly dangerous species has been and keeps on spraying urine in the garden, they will keep away!

To make it a bit more appetizing for your human nose, you could add some citrus juice, cayenne and vinegar to your homemade cat repellent.

If hygiene in your garden is as important as keeping cats out of your garden, try moth balls. Put the moth balls all around the base of the house, in bushes and everywhere else you want to repel cats.

Natural plant cat repellents

Although some people say rosemary keeps the cats out, it doesn’t work in my garden. However another plant does work fairly well as a natural cat repellent: the Coleus Canina or Scardy Cat Plant.

It grows in any kind of soil as long as it gets full sun or partial shade. Make sure to protect it against the frost in winter.

When crushed, the Scardy Cat Plant emits a foul odour that repels cats.

Homemade cat repellents summarized

When you have a big garden, using male urine is the best way to go. Closer by the house we recommend you use Coleus Canina as your most easy homemade cat repellent.

Pictures that show the 4 different possible tabby patterns on orange and silver tabby kittens and cats.

The tabby cats pattern

The word "tabby cats" is so often used that some people think ‘a tabby’ is a certain cat breed. But to be correct: in cat language "tabby" stands for a color pattern:

• most often stripes,
• sometimes stripes and whorls, or even
• sometimes spots and stripes.

The tabby pattern is found in many pedigreed cats today, and although there are many variations of each, the tabby pattern falls into four basic classes:

• classic tabby (marbled tabby or blotched tabby)
  a classic tabby pattern usually consists of a swirling pattern with thick stripes, similar to a bulls-eye on a dart board
   
• mackerel tabby (‘fishbone tabbies’) or striped with the typical ‘M’ on their head
   
• spotted tabby
   
• agouti tabby or ticked
  the hairs of the cat have small bands of color on them, giving the fur a ‘salt and pepper’ appearance
    

Below a few tabby cat pictures with from different breeds with different colors.

Orange tabby kittens

4 orange tabby kittens:
1 nicely posing
1 fed up kitten
1 kitten wants to escape through the window and
the last kitten wondering how the previous is going to succeed

Silver tabby kittens

Silver Tabby Kittens
showing the typical tabby ‘M’ on their heads

Siamese tabby kittens

Siamese tabby kitten, also showing the typical tabby ‘M’ on the head

Put your Russian blue cats for sale here: see in the comments who wants to buy them and who has Russian blue kittens for cat adoption. Do note that this breed doesn’t come in tabby patterns.

Russian blue cats

Russian blue cats get their name from their unique short, plush, silver-blue coat. Actually this blue has a double coat:

• a soft and downy undercoat and
• the longer guard hairs blue-silver tips as if your cat was shimmering.

Unlike in the cat photo above, most Russian blue cats have green eyes, but apart from the color it is most important that the eyes are dark and vivid.

This breed of cat is not known to give much cat health care problems.

A blue cat is highly intelligent and playful but they tend to be shy around strangers. However blue cats do develop a very close bond with their human companion and is an ideal cat gift for life.

Please leave a comment when you consider a Russian blue cat adoption or when you have Russian blue cats for sale.

Download this free cute cat in the sink wallpaper or download the Cheshire cat wallpaper from Alice in Wonderland.

The above long haired cat enjoys the sink as her favorite napping spot. Far better than a cat making the sink her litter box…

Cheshire cat wallpaper

If you love cartoons, then download this Cheshire cat wallpaper.

Cheshire cats only exists on desktops and movies. It’s a character originally created by Lewis Carroll for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Alice encounters this cat first at the Duchess’s house in her kitchen, and then later outside on the branches of a tree, where it appears and disappears at will.

Both free wallpapers are 1024 x 768 and about 100KB in size, click the picture to download the original, bigger size.

Orange boy is an orange tabby who adopted a human with a blog at Save Moki‘s and got bitten by a snake.

Get your tabby cat or kitten featured!

Just leave a comment at our blog like Save Moki did so we can contact you and feature you and your pet(s) here

Orange Boy caught our attention because he has been fighting a … snake. The puncture marks are in front of the head, means Orange Boy stood his ground:

After being bitten by the rattle snake, no anti-venom was administered. Rattle snakes are biting more and more people these days, so people first, than cats when it comes to receiving the antidotes, only if there is no other choice…

We wish Orange Boy a great recovery and although rattle snake bites are scary, seems Orange Boy is on his way to recovery already