Can You Give Baby Kittens Infant Formula

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.

Can you give baby kittens infant formula. Because human baby formula is made from cow s milk it is high in lactose. If you can t find a bunny nursing bottle at your local pet store purchase a nursing bottle with nipples designed for newborn kittens. This means if the kitten weighs four ounces they should eat about 32 milliliters of formula total in a day so you can give eight milliliters of formula every four hours. Kittens should eat about eight milliliters of formula per ounce of body weight a day.

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. Be aware that milk sold in cartons as cat milk is not suitable. We give it water now but the formula seemed fine for the kitten. It didn t seem to bother her at all.

For this reason a kitten or cat should also not be given cow s milk. Also we were donating things to our animal shelter a few years ago things like pet food old towels and blankets ect and they said that regular baby formula was fine for kittens to. To give the colostrum time to settle prepare the homemade milk formula two or three hours before you plan to feed the baby bunny. You use it in much the same way you use infant formula in that you follow the directions on the packaging which guides you as to how many scoops to use to how much water.

A new litter of kittens is often an exciting event but if something goes wrong and you need to care for the kittens you may suddenly need kitten formula. Kitten milk replacement milk comes in a tub or drum and is a dry powder or liquid. Kittens younger than 4 or 5 weeks need their mother s milk to thrive. Instead make up the formula at twice the strength indicated for human babies.

However you need to ignore the directions on the package. 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. 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. I think it was called prosobee or something like that.