From Birth to Adulthood
The mother cat licks each newborn kitten to remove the membrane that envelopes it. This licking behavior continues well beyond birth, as mothers lick their kittens to stimulate and awaken them. The first thing a kitten does after birth is to seek its mother's teats.
At birth, kittens cannot regulate their body temperature and are thus very fragile and highly dependent on their mother to keep the nest warm. The rectal temperature of very young kittens is approximately 37C°, rising gradually to 38 to 38.5C° by the age of seven weeks. Thus, it is best to heat the queening box to 33C° the first week after birth and 30C° in the following weeks, decreasing the temperature to 28C° around the fourth or fifth week after birth and 26C° thereafter.
The Kitten's Development
A kitten acquires many abilities between birth and adulthood. The major changes occur before weaning, while the kittens are still nursing.
The Five Senses
At birth, the kitten already has a sense of smell keen enough to find its mother from a distance of 50 cm. Similarly, it is able to distinguish the three basic flavors: sweet, salty, and bitter (it dislikes salty and bitter).
However, kittens are born blind and deaf. They acquire the senses of sight and hearing almost simultaneously.
Hearing develops when the kittens are around five days old, but they cannot orient themselves to sound until they are about fourteen days old. They do not have the hearing ability of an adult until the age of one month, at which time they learn to recognize their mother's voice.
Kittens first open their eyes seven to fifteen days after birth and acquire depth perception three or four days later. The simultaneous acquisition of sight and hearing requires a few days of adaptation.
Although far from nimble, kittens have a sense of balance from a very early age.
They have difficulty coordinating their movements before they are two weeks old. They begin walking on four legs at around seventeen days old and are agile enough to scratch an ear with a hind leg around three weeks old.
Dental Development
It is fairly easy to determine a cat's age based on the date when baby and adult teeth first appear, since one needs only to open its mouth (see table at right).
Main Areas of the Body
Not all the main areas of the body develop at the same rate. Kittens are born with a relatively large head; then the limbs grow longer, making the kitten look quite tall and gangly. Finally, the rest of the body catches up, eventually attaining typical adult proportions.
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