Can You Feed A Kitten Regular Baby Formula

In an emergency you may be able to use powdered or concentrated human baby formula to sustain an orphaned kitten until you can get some regular feline milk replacer.

Can you feed a kitten regular baby formula. Nursing kittens need formula if mom isn t around. Instead make up the formula at twice the strength indicated for human babies. Baby bunnies are often more receptive to warm milk because it mimics mama s body temperature. Kittens that are bottle fed should consume about a tablespoon or 15 ml of special kitten formula at each feeding.

The cornell book of cats says that human baby formula can be used if made up to double the normal strength although human baby formula is normally not nutritious enough for kittens. Check the directions on your kitten formula to determine how much to feed your kitten. Place the bottle in warm water to keep it warm until you are ready to feed the baby. In an emergency you may be able to use powdered or concentrated human baby formula to sustain an orphaned kitten until you can get some regular feline milk replacer.

To give the colostrum time to settle prepare the homemade milk formula two or three hours before you plan to feed the baby bunny. If you find young kittens that have been abandoned or whose mom isn t able to nurse them you ll need to bottle feed them formula yourself. However you need to ignore the directions on the package. Instead make up the formula at twice the strength indicated for human babies.

Plan to be up every 2 hours or so to feed them just like a baby. This can cause the kittens to lose fluid so the milk will do more harm than good. Kittens younger than 4 or 5 weeks need their mother s milk to thrive. We do not recommend using the other formulas for long term bottle feeding but they can be useful should you need to feed your kittens and can t find the ingredients for the homemade goat s milk formula.

Once the formula passes the skin temperature test you are ready to feed the kitten. During the first week feed the kitten 32 cc of formula per day broken up into small amounts bottle fed every two hours. This is very time consuming for someone who is bottle feeding a newborn kitten so if at all possible you will want to try to keep the kitten with its mother or a surrogate lactating cat who can nurse it. You will need to buy formula.

Kittens should eat about eight milliliters of formula per ounce of body weight a day. Keep the kitten in a natural feeding position on its belly and offer warm formula every three to four hours until the kitten begins to wean to solid food. As a general rule a newborn kitten will nurse for 5 to 10 minutes at a time never more than that. It is more of a treat minus the lactose so cats and kittens can digest it.