Took in young Stray Femaie cat & 2 weeks later had 4 kittens

We took in a stray cat, she was very loving and gentle, because she was a stray she was very thin, she seem to adapt very easily to being confined to 1 room no problem using the litter box and ate constantly. We noticed she gained weight really quickly and did not give it a second thought because we assumed that she was just really hungry from not being fed properly.....but 2 weeks later she had 4 kittens....she seem to be very protective over her kittens. Understandable...but we have other animals and over the days she became extremely protective so we put up gates on the doorway so our other animals could not enter. One day, I didn't completely close the gate and she went completely crazy....attacking out dog, myself and my daughter, clawing us all very badly. We managed to get her back in the room with her kittens and just minutes later she was fine, feeding her kittens as if nothing had happened. Okay we did decide that we would have to give her away but before the week was over, she did another attack on me and my daughter very badly attacking us. Inspire of our injuries, I feel terrible that we had to take their to the animal shelter. Was this a normal behavior? we did keep the kittens because the shelter told us they would put the kittens to sleep and

I just couldn't bare that we had to get rid of the mother who was just adorable, I just couldn't get rid of the kittens. They are 5 weeks old and just barely learning to drink water on their own, I have not idea how we are going to feed them. We are planning to find good homes for them also. I don?t know if we did the right thing. I am such an animal lover that I feed so bad for the mother cat.


Answer by Kate
I'm sorry to hear that you have given away the mother cat before the kittens were completely weaned, which is around 8 weeks. Unfortunately the kittens will miss some vital lessons from their mum and as you say you will have to take the mothers cats place and wean the kittens yourself. I have a web page about weaning kittens which I think you should find helpful, here is the page

https://www.our-happy-cat.com/kitten-weaning.html

What is done is done and so the best thing you can do now is to give the kittens all the love and care you can

The mother cats behavior was quite normal especially for a stray/feral cat. Unfortunately they can be very tough to learn to live with and they never really become as domesticated as we would like. It is likely that she would have always been a very distant cat.

best wishes Kate

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attacking cat
by: tracy

Hi,

I have a 3 year old cat named Bootsie. We decided we wanted to get him a playmate because he is so friendly and anytime we had any animals visit he was so good with them, dog or cat. We just took in a kitten. She is around 3 months old now. She was born to a feral Mama cat. In fact, both cats my boyfriend rescued from a abandoned house. Anyway, bootsie loves her. her name is Bonnie. Both are tiger cats and so beautiful. One day I accidently stepped on the kitten and the kitten hissed at me. I should have let the kitten be, but I went after her to let her know I was sorry. well, all of a sudden Bootsie attacked me and I was all scratched up bleeding a lot from the sctatches. This shocked me.Bootsie never did anything like that. he is a 17 pound cat..he is big! he was just protecting her and that was his instincts to do that. He has done this a couple of times and hissed at me once or twice..but it has stopped (so far anyway) I will never understand one day out of the blue he started hissing at me and nothing happened to the kitten.

Anyway what happened to you was normal behavior for that cat. However, you have to protect your family from being attacked. I really don't know what we would do if this behavior kept up. We cannot keep getting attacked. Anyway...thank you for taking in these cats. Yo are wonderful for doing that!

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