Kitten not pooping HELP!!!

Hi Genna, there used to be a video on Utube on caring for younf kittens, it seems to have been taken down. But, if you click on the tags “messybeast’ or ‘orphan’ on the right side of the page, you will get a list of previous posts on this subject, and there should be some posts where people have explained some of the information you need. Estacey is right re: stimulating so kitten can poop, and you’re on the right track with the milk replacement instead of cows milk. Also, I’m a huge fan of calling in expert advice, I would say hook up with a local vet and see what help they can provide as well.
God bless you for taking this baby. I can’t even comment on someone taking newborns away from their mother like that, my thoughts would be unprintable. If you can reach out to your kitten’s siblings’ new parents, you might be able to trade info and support as well, they might be as worried and lost as you are. Good luck and please let us know how things go!

Ohhh, sorry, two weeks old. Okay, well, kittens don’t have to poop every day, especially if they’re still on milk, so I still wouldn’t worry too much, and you might not recognise the poop as poop if you see it, it might resemble brown, smellier pee. Just keep stimulating her before and after every meal and if it gets to be three days without poop, you can try adding a few drops of a vegetable oil (eg olive, soya, rice bran) or mineral oil to her milk. You can also try diluting her KMR a bit more with water. Powdered KMR does seem to constipate kittens, you can sieve it before you give it to her, or you can switch to canned liquid KMR or you can try canned goats’ milk (from the Baking section at Walmart or similar) — goats milk is good for them and they are able to digest it. If she still won’t take the milk, you could always try her on ‘glop’, which is emergency kitten formula made mostly from either condensed or evaporated milk. Click on ‘kitten glop’ for loads of recipes and click on ‘constipation’ for more help with this very very common problem with kittens.

If you want to try pumpkin, it has to be absolutely plain cooked pumpkin, so either boil it yourself or use plain canned pumpkin — NOT pie filling, no spices or anything added, and just give her a very little.
Best of luck and let us know how it’s going.

Happy Dance for poop & better days ahead for new furry purry!

HI Genna. I was so saddened and horrified to read about this woman. Educated or not, that’s sick behavior. If you can get that cat away from her somehow it would be such a blessing. What a great person you are to step up and help this little life.

Anyway, I had my adventure starting in June when I started bottle feeding two day old kittens. I still see lots of videos about bottle feeding on you tube, and the links that people gave me here were very helpful. The shelter also helped me also by giving me the KMR (they booked the kittens as though I was fostering them) and I ended up ordering the pet nursers in bulk from amazon. I went through a lot of nipples in those first three months.

It was also kind of shocking to me how much bad advice there is out there. “Oh they usually die, so it’s not your fault.” Well my conclusion was it often is people’s fault because they kinda sorta try to do the right thing. There are no visual cues that you’re doing the wrong things, so yeah, it may not seem to matter that you don’t get up in the middle of the night to feed them, but it does mean you’re slowing starving them to death. And no, you can’t save the formula if the kitten doesn’t drink it, it’ll grow enormous amounts of bacteria after it was heated. Not that any of this is directed at you; I guess I’m just having flash backs to how hard it really was and people’s tendency to downplay that.

But anyway, they all survived and they are a joy!!! If you go back and read my posts like you I was having fits over the pooping issue. I got so much good advice here and such bad/nonspecific advice from vets. Not that any of this is news to the very experience people here, but my advice would be to get a handle on sterilizing bottles, dangers of aspiration, getting the forumula to the right temp (I stuck the bottle in a cup of hot water to heat it and then used a CVS therm. to test), stimulating them to poop/pee (there’s a great video on the triangle method out there.) I kept a chart about how much they ate and who pooped. I also kept a bottle of pedialyte in the fridge at all times if I thought they weren’t eating enough.

You’re probably way ahead on all of the above, but thought I’d mention it. Also vet at emergency clinic told me not to use mineral oil when they are that young, stick to pumpkin a laxative from the vet. I finally had to use the latter, but was really glad I had it on hand when they needed it. OH and IMO don’t ever go back and forth between the canned KMR and the powder – their systems can’t handle it.

Anyway good luck and wish you all the best. 🙂

Hi there, my name is Thomas me and my partner just rescued a black kitten from homelessness and hunger… we think that she is somewhere between 4 and 6 weeks old. We’ve been feeding her some canned chicken that we had in the pantry… it was the only thing we had on short notice anyway she hasn’t pooped for about a day and a half now… well we think… the first night we found her we tried stimulation with a warm wash rag and I saw brown stains on it and I think that was poop but my partner is convinced that it was just from the last time she pooped. Then again today while i was at work he saw her what he thought was pee but it was really brown… kinda like an extremely dehydrated urine looks like but smelled like the chicken we’ve been feeding her… dose anyone have any comments to help us? We’re worried that she’ll get sick…