Today’s post is sorta boring unless you’re another breeder or just interested in random stats. But I’ll post it here anyway.
I’ve been catching up on all my kitten paperwork, pictures, etc. and finally got around to entering the handwritten kitten weight charts into the spreadsheet on my computer. I keep a Excel workbook with a page for each litter. For each kitten in the litter I weigh them daily for a while, then switch to weekly weighing until they reach 14-16 weeks. I now do daily weigh ins for the first two weeks, but in the beginning I just did it for the first week. I also added in a 12 hour check several litters ago. Now and then, I miss a week because I’m gone — or because it got done at the vets’ office that week and I never wrote it on my chart at home. But for nearly every kitten, I have 14 weeks of growth data.
One thing a breeder should be doing is learning about (and, if you’re somewhat obsessive like me, recording) is how the lines she is working with develop and mature. So I not only track litters, but the overall development of the litters in comparison to other litter with the same mother. I should go back and do it by the father, ’cause that would also be interesting to me, as well. Then I compare the overall averages between different lines.
One thing that I’ve found is that birth weight in and of itself is not an indicator of eventual size. Bria’s and Kefira’s kittens are bigger than Shira’s on average. Kali’s are the smallest. Yet in talking with the owners of kittens after the kittens have matured, Bria’s and Kefira’s kittens have grown slower and are mostly smaller as adults than Shira’s or Kali’s. (Although, in both Kali’s and Kefira’s cases we’re only seeing kittens at a year old so far. ) I also find that a weight at 14 weeks can be an indicator of eventual relative size, but not an absolute.
One always has to be careful drawing too many conclusions from an average or looking at data in isolation. In Kali’s case, her first litter was large (8 kittens born, 7 surviving) and that’s a big litter for any cat. It stands to reason that they were all on the small side. The biggest of Kali’s first litter was under the average for all the litters combined. But he is not smaller than average now. But that litter, with their low birth weights and slower growth, has brought down the stats overall for Kali’s litters. Talia had three litters of only two kittens among her litters – and those kittens thrived and grew quickly. But Talia is also the biggest of my breeding females, so I’d expect her kittens to be the largest of the bunch. I think her litter stats are a combination of smaller litters (part of the time) and a larger mother.
Anyway, just some musing on kitten growth, weights, and lines. And, perhaps, a little bit of insight into how my mind works!
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Age
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Shira’s kittens
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Talia’s kittens
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Bria’s kittens
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Kefira’s kittens
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Kalispell’s kittens
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All kittens
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By the way, if you’re a regular reader of the blog, you know that my main reason for weighing kittens has more to do with health monitoring than tracking trends or lines. If you’re not a regular reader, here’s the reasoning behind that. Kittens can’t talk and tell us when they don’t feel great. Oh, they tell you in non-verbal ways like throwing up or having diarrhea, but sometimes those signs aren’t present and yet a kitten may not be thriving. Especially in the early weeks when kittens mostly eat and sleep, it can be tough to tell by looking if a kitten is doing well.
Some breeders never weigh their kittens. They say, “I can tell by the way the kitten ‘feels’ if he or she is doing okay.” And to a certain extent, that is true. I’m a firm believer in handling kittens a lot and paying to your gut feeling when you think someone doesn’t ‘feel’ right. It’s prompted me many times to weigh a kitten every 12 hours instead of daily or to add a couple mid-week weigh ins to make sure someone doesn’t have a problem.
But to me, the weigh in can be the first indicator that something is wrong. You might not feel a 1 oz drop in weight in a 18 oz kitten, but the scale does. And the kitten may still be active, eating, and seemingly fine. But that 1 oz drop means I’ll weigh again tomorrow to make sure 1 oz hasn’t become 2 or 3, signalling a real problem. Kitten too cold, getting an infection, something?
It’s also about trends. If you weigh your kittens regularly, you know that a 3 oz per week gain is about average (depending on your lines, of course!) If someone has a week or two of 1 or 1.5 oz gains when everyone else is gaining 3-4 oz a week, again, there might be a problem worth investigating. It could be something as simple as the slow poke is getting pushed away from the nipple by the others — or the nipple he wants to use is blocked by fur. He might need a little kick start in the form of supplementation with a bottle, syringe, or tube. In the wild, this slow gainer might not make it, simply because he doesn’t get enough nutrition, but breeders are all about making sure everyone gets as good a chance at a long healthy life as we can give them. On the sadder, hard side of this is that some kittens really do have a problem that cannot be solved. If you are paying attention and follow up, you may save this little one from days of suffering before he finally crosses the Bridge. No matter what the result of your careful monitoring, I think the few minutes spent weighing your kittens is worth it.
Okay off my soapbox and off to lunch. Have a great weekend everyone!
Have a restore to do for someone. 
