How to Care for a Pregnant Cat

Feline pregnancy runs about 63 to 65 days, with a normal range of roughly 61 to 70. The reassuring part is that cats generally manage the whole business extremely well on their own.

Your job is nutrition, a safe quiet place, and recognising the small number of things that go wrong. The rest she will handle without any help from you.

Confirming it

Early signs are subtle. Nipples become pinker and more prominent, sometimes called pinking up, at around three weeks. Some queens have a few days of reduced appetite early on.

A vet can confirm by ultrasound from around three to four weeks. X-ray from about day 45 counts kittens reliably, and that count matters: knowing there are five means knowing when only four have arrived.

Feeding

This is where owners under-deliver. A pregnant queen needs considerably more energy, and a nursing one needs dramatically more, often two to three times her normal intake at peak lactation.

• Switch to kitten food from around the fourth week of pregnancy and continue throughout nursing. It carries the energy and nutrient density needed, and she cannot eat enough adult maintenance food to compensate
• Free access late in pregnancy. A crowded abdomen means small, frequent meals
• Fresh water constantly, which matters even more during lactation
• Do not supplement calcium during pregnancy unless a vet instructs it. It can interfere with the hormonal control that prevents eclampsia after birth

A queen losing condition during nursing is being under-fed, not failing. Feed more.

Worming and medication

Deworming during pregnancy, on a schedule your vet sets with products safe for pregnancy, reduces what passes to the kittens. Do not use ordinary parasite products without checking, since several are unsafe in pregnancy.

Vaccination is best done before mating rather than during pregnancy. If she is due, ask rather than assume.

The nesting box

Introduce it two weeks before the due date so she accepts it, otherwise she will choose a wardrobe, a drawer, or under a bed.

• Somewhere quiet, dim, warm and away from household traffic
• A box with sides high enough to keep kittens in and a low entrance she can step over
• Lined with soft, washable material that can be changed
• Food, water and a litter tray nearby, so she does not have to leave the kittens far

Cats value privacy during labour more than dogs do. A queen who feels watched or exposed may stop labouring, which is a genuine phenomenon and not stubbornness.

Labour

Restlessness, pacing, seeking the nest, grooming excessively, sometimes vocalising. Appetite usually drops in the last day. A temperature drop precedes labour, though taking a cat's temperature repeatedly may cost more in stress than the information is worth.

Kittens usually arrive every 10 to 60 minutes. Queens can pause labour for a couple of hours mid-litter and resume normally, which is more common in cats than dogs.

Watch from a distance. Interference is the most common way owners cause problems.

Call a vet immediately if

• Strong straining for 20 to 30 minutes with no kitten
• More than two hours between kittens while still straining, or four hours of rest when kittens are known to remain
• Pregnancy passes 70 days
• Foul-smelling or dark green discharge before the first kitten
• Heavy fresh bleeding
• A kitten visibly stuck for more than a few minutes
• She is collapsed, panting heavily, trembling or clearly distressed
• She abandons labour with kittens still inside

After the birth

• Weigh kittens daily for the first two weeks. Steady gain is the clearest sign nursing is working, and a kitten not gaining needs attention today rather than tomorrow
• Check every kitten is feeding, not only the strongest
• Keep them warm. Newborn kittens cannot regulate temperature and chill quickly
• Leave the queen to it. Handle kittens minimally in the first days
• Watch her for fever, foul discharge, refusing food, or a hot painful mammary gland, which suggests mastitis

Eclampsia

Less common in cats than dogs but serious: restlessness, panting, tremors, stiffness and seizures during nursing, caused by calcium crashing under milk demand. It is an emergency and it is rapidly reversible when treated.

Afterwards

Cats can come into season again remarkably quickly after weaning, and unplanned second litters are common. If you do not intend to breed again, discuss timing for spaying while the kittens are still nursing rather than after the fact.

Kittens themselves start weaning around three to four weeks and are usually fully weaned by seven to eight, which is also the earliest they should go to new homes.

Most feline births need nothing. The ones that do need something need it urgently and usually at night, and a caesarean is not a cost anybody has budgeted for at that hour.

Every Skeepy Pet HMO plan includes unlimited vet consultations and covers emergencies within the plan's limits, at any vet clinic in Nigeria, which keeps that decision clinical rather than financial.