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Most visitors to Best Friends Animal Society's Mission Hills rescue centerwill spend time with adoptable dogs in their cool, misted kennels orin one of the cat playrooms in an attempt to coax the fluffy felines from their cozy cat trees.
But tucked behind a labyrinth of hallways, there's a kitten nursery—open only to staff and qualified volunteers—that provides around-the-clock care to about 100 underage kittens at any given time. A cluster of kennels, with fun names like the Milk Mansion and the Aquarium, surrounds a series of feeding stations where staff and volunteers bottle-feed and weighkittens every two to four hours.
Robert Wagner Volunteers At Best Friends Kitten Nursery
At around eight weeks, the kittens are typically ready to be fixed and put up for adoption. But until that point, Best Friends watches over the underage felines in the nursery.Kittens under four weeks old are bottle fed, often on their tummies as if they're nursing or swaddled in a blanket. The older kittens are transitioned to a slurry of wet food, and all of the cats are weighed after each feeding. The youngest ones need a little bit of help going to the bathroom;in the absence of a mother's tongue, a soft, warm rag on their behindshelps to stimulate their urge to go.
This sort of hands-on attentionisn't limited to the nursery, though.Best Friends provides food and care instructions for foster families willing to take in a kitten for at least two weeks. The program is an integral means of allowing Best Friends to continuously take more kittens into its nursery.
Any time that we send a litter of kittens out to foster and open up a kennel in our nursery, we're immediately able to go to the L.A. city shelters, grab another litter of kittens in need and rescue them, says Liz Pashley, the foster program coordinator.
The Scoop On Kitten Fostering Best Friends
That's because Best Friends doesn't directly take in strays; rather, they scoop up homeless animalsfrom thesix Los Angeles city shelters to raise them, nurture them and give them a second chance at the spacious Mission Hills rescue center. Over the course of a year Best Friends aims to save 3, 000 underage kittens—they're already over 1, 000 this year.
The good news is that Best Friends' kittens typically find forever homes almost as soon as they're put up for adoption. But getting them to that point poses one of the biggest citywide challenges.
Kittens are actually the most susceptible population in our city shelters, so that means they're actually one of the highest euthanized populations, says Kara Odenbaugh, one of the kitten nursery leads. That's because the shelters don't have the time or the resources that it takes to take care of them.
La's Pet Adoption Centers
If your heart is bursting from kitten envy and empathy right now, you can partake in Best Friends' foster program with little past experience required; they regularly host foster orientation sessions—including at theClear the Nursery Day on Saturday, May 13. If you can't take one home but do want some hands-on kitten time, you can volunteer in the kitten nurseryafter completing training videos and quizzes as well as a series of nursery shadowing sessions. Otherwise, be on the lookout for Best Friends' newmobile adoption center, the Purritos truck.
© 2023 Time Out England Limited and affiliated companies owned by Time Out Group Plc. All rights reserved. Time Out is a registered trademark of Time Out Digital Limited.A new kitten nursery opens at the Best Friends Visitor Center in Kanab. Visitors can watch the lifesaving work happen through a viewing window.
When the new Best Friends Kitten Nursery officially opened on August 11, Oboe was one of the first kittens there. Though the tiny orphaned kitten already had enough personality for a whole litter of kittens, he was still completely dependent on people for his care. But he couldn’t have landed in a better place to get the help and TLC he needed to survive and thrive.
Help Clear The Kitten Nursery In L.a.
Oboe was just three weeks old when he was brought to Best Friends Animal Society from a small rural shelter. He’d arrived at the shelter alone — with no mother cat to care for him and no siblings.
Newborn kittens are especially at risk of being killed in shelters, not just because they are too young to take care of themselves, but because newborn kitten care is demanding. Baby cats must be bottle-fed every few hours. They must be kept warm because they can’t regulate their own body temperatures, and they even need help going to the bathroom. Most shelters don’t have the resources to provide this around-the-clock care. And there’s rarely enough space to house kittens for up to two months — the time required until they are big enough to be spayed or neutered and move on to foster or forever homes.
Kittens in shelters are also extremely vulnerable to disease because their immune systems are not yet developed. The shelter where Oboe ended up had recently faced several outbreaks of feline panleukopenia. Panleukopenia symptoms in kittens can include fever, dehydration, loss of appetite, vomiting and diarrhea. If kittens don’t get immediate medical treatment, the virus can be deadly. Whisking Oboe out of the shelter and into the Best Friends Kitten Nursery dramatically increased his chances of survival.
So There's A 'kitten Shower' This Saturday Hosted By The Best Friends Animal Society
Though technically part of Cat World, the new nursery is located in the Best Friends Visitor Center in downtown Kanab, just minutes down the road from the Sanctuary. The space is light-filled and sparkling clean. It has several bottle-feeding stations, a separate room to house kittens with contagious illnesses and storage space for everything a growing kitten could possibly need (think piles of fleece blankets, heating discs, formula and food).
There’s a big viewing window so visitors can peek in and see all the good kitten rescue work and care happening there — not to mention all the tiny, adorable balls of fluff. The nursery not only saves lives, but it provides the general public with the eye-opening experience of watching the actual work in progress. Kittens need help everywhere, so when future visitors return home, they’ll be more aware of the issue and more likely to lend a hand to kittens at home.
The nursery was also the perfect place for a little guy like Oboe to grow into the healthy, happy kitten he is today.
Neonate Kittens Growth Kitten Nursery
The nursery is set up to provide care for kittens in all three stages of development: bottle babies, weaning kittens and independents.
Kittens up to four weeks old are bottle baby kittens. That’s the stage Oboe was in when he first came to Best Friends. Every two to four hours, one of his caregivers would scoop him up and bring him to a feeding station. There, they would use a soft tissue to help him urinate and defecate, and then clean him up. Then, they’d warm formula in a newborn kitten bottle and hold Oboe in a natural nursing position (on his tummy with his head up) while he drank.
At first, Oboe was a little bit challenging to bottle-feed. The growing kitten had a big appetite, and whenever he couldn’t seem to drink the formula fast enough, he’d get frustrated. Then he’d stop nursing, mew loudly and swipe at the bottle with his tiny paws. But his kind and patient caregivers soothed Oboe and sat with him until he settled down, latched back onto the bottle and drank his fill.
From Best Friends As
Finally, Oboe would get a gentle massage to help release any air he swallowed, as well as get help going to the bathroom again. Like all bottle babies, Oboe was weighed once a day to make sure he was growing normally and gaining enough weight. When he was done eating, he’d go back to his newly cleaned enclosure, crawl up onto his snuggle (heating) disc and fall asleep. Since he didn’t have any siblings to snuggle up to, caregivers gave Oboe a soft stuffed toy to cuddle. Then in a few hours, the whole process started over again.
Soon, Oboe was big and strong enough to join the ranks of the weaning kittens at the nursery. Kittens are weaned at three to five weeks, when they’re fed gruel every three to five hours. The gruel (a mixture of formula and canned kitten food) helps kittens transition from formula to kitten food. Things can get a little messy at this stage, so while Oboe was weaning, he frequently would often get covered in food and needed to be wiped up or bathed. In this stage, Oboe also had access to dry food, water and a litter box, just as he’ll eventually have in his future life as an adult cat.
Once he learned to eat wet food out of a bowl, things got a bit tidier for Oboe. As an “independent” kitten (five weeks and up), Oboe was fed regular kitten food (instead of gruel) every five to eight hours. That gave him lots of extra time to practice his stalking and pouncing skills. The
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