Place for delivery of a Cat

As soon as a cat starts to inspect the house looking for a place to deliver, and is meddling around the closets, boxes, baskets or shelves, one has to prepare the box for the litter. One can use a basket, a hard carton box or a drawer of about 30 x 50 cms. with borders of 20 to 25 cms. The cat has to have enough space to stretch. One can add a pillow or cushion with a washable cover for their comfort. Fill it with newspaper and a clean cloth to cover it. Put the box in a calm and quiet place and let the mother get adapted to it. Some, no matter what you do for them, will deliver on the place she chooses best.

The birth: Normally, the cat does not need one's help to give birth, but many like not to be left alone, above all if its her first delivery. One will understand because of her behavior that the time has come. She leaps once and again into the birth box and then she goes to the service, often without using it. If you try to calm her, at the end she will stay put. A little while before delivery time, she will release the amniotic liquid. Shortly after, the first whelp is expelled in the box. In case the whelp has trouble coming out the mother will pull it to help and once out will lick the new born until it reacts and starts to move and to make sounds. Then she cuts the umbilical cordon with her teeth and eats the placenta. Little by little all the whelps come out. This can last an hour or two, but sometimes it can last a whole day.

While the mother purrs happily stretched sideways, and the whelps are like hanging from her nipples, one can carefully pull out the dirty and humid cloth and newspapers out of the box, leaving the clean and dry pillow below the new family.

The first days and week: The new born whelps are deaf and blind. But they already have all the skin with the fur designed. The head with its little ears is relatively large, little body, and weak legs. Nails cannot recoil and are covered with a membrane that falls of after birth. Instinct guides them to the nipples where they feed. They suck the nipples while pressing them with their front paws to ease the milk out. This kind of movement is kept with the cat until he is an adult, above all when he is happy, like when he rests on one's lap and purrs pleased with himself, his paws move with a kind of stamping and a massaging way.