From Kitten to Cat: Growth, Nutrition & Preventive Care Milestones
Once you have all the food, toys, and other supplies to welcome a new kitten into your home, it’s time to sit back and enjoy life with a new best friend! But don’t forget that, as each day passes, your kitten is getting closer to adulthood. It takes about a year or so for a kitten to become an adult, and you can mark the milestones in veterinary check-ups, vaccines, weigh-ins, and nutritional consultations. Keep reading for our recommendations about preventive care as kittens become cats.
Getting Bigger All the Time
At the start of each appointment with your veterinary team, we’ll weigh your kitten to compare to previous weigh-ins. Your pet’s body condition will help us monitor growth progress. We want to see steady growth and weight gain (in ways that depend on your cat’s breed). Your Michigan kitten care providers will look for growth that aligns with the following stages:
- Up to 8 weeks of age, a kitten should be with their nursing mother. They’ll gain weight each day, and need their mother’s milk to do so.
- The earliest you would adopt a kitten would generally be in the 2 to 4 month window. They’ll continue to gain weight quickly, and look a lot like the little balls of fluff we associate with kittenhood.
- From 4 months up to that 1 year mark, kittens will develop muscles along leaner limbs, losing their round baby shape and becoming true adult cats.
Your kitten’s weight will affect nutrition and parasite prevention recommendations, which you’ll read more about below.
Feed Them Right
After a kitten is weaned from their mother’s milk, it’s time to introduce solid and/or canned kitten food. It takes a lot of energy just to grow, but when you factor in playing and learning, you can understand why kitten-specific food has more calories than adult cat food. A gradual transition to an adult diet prevents older cats from gaining too much weight from high-calorie kitten diets.
Aside from age-appropriate caloric intake, you need to think about the benefits of dry or canned food. Wet food helps with hydration, but certain dry foods can be good for dental health. You’ll also need to consider how many and what kind of treats are appropriate. Additionally, if your kitty is diagnosed with certain conditions, prescription diets can become a vital part of treatment. Feline nutrition should be tailored to your cat’s life stage and health, and we’ll discuss your pet’s needs at each appointment.
Prevention is Key
The bulk of each kitten veterinary visit will be dedicated to vaccines, parasite prevention, and other important wellness services. That’s what makes these true milestones: each veterinary exam is an opportunity to help your kitten be as healthy as possible for life.
At Beverly Hills Veterinary Associates, we like to schedule kitten visits starting at adoption with the following wellness services in mind:
- Vaccines, like FVRCP and feline leukemia, which will need to be boosted in about a month. FVRCP may require up to 4 boosters in the series. The rabies vaccine can be given at 16 weeks of age.
- Fecal exams will reveal whether your kitten has certain intestinal parasites. We can check and recheck throughout the series of kitten visits, and we’ll dispense dewormers as needed.
- Flea, tick, and heartworm prevention can protect your cat against a myriad of illnesses, and it should be administered throughout life.
- Bloodwork is important to check ahead of your pet’s spay or neuter surgery, and baseline youth results can provide insight when compared to results over your cat’s lifetime.
Speaking of spay/neuter surgery, that is a huge milestone that occurs at about 6 months of age. As part of preventive care, this surgery obviously prevents unwanted litters, but it can also prevent the urge to run away in search of a mate and prevent the development of certain cancers.
As you settle into daily life with your new kitten, be aware that a lot can change on the way to adulthood. Keep these milestones in mind to forge a healthy lifetime path for your pet!