Hey everyone! This one is for the cat and kitten people out there: 8 months ago I took in a stray mother calico who was pregnant. She was very young, maybe just over a year old herself, and she wound up having 5 kittens; 3 of them males who were dark gray and white, one gray/brown highlighted female (whose fur pattern doesn’t resemble mom at all, lol, gee I wonder what dad looked like..), and a white/ginger male runt.
All of them are alive and healthy in great homes except Ginger, who I’m sorry to say did not make it past the second day. I’d say somewhere between the 24-30 hour post-birth marker.
I am curious as to how he managed to die, because it happened while I was asleep. The previous night, after inspecting the nest, I realized Ginger was missing and saw a lump moving under the blankets just outside the catbed/nest. After returning him to the nest near mom’s buffet using a towel (to avoid getting my scent on Ginger), mom started cleaning him a bit and if I remember correctly I did see him find an open teet and start suckling before I went to bed. The following morning, however, I noticed he was missing again and deduced in horror that he had to be under mom; sure enough, he was, dead from apparent suffocation.
In hindsight I am wondering now if he had some undetectable sensory problem that led him under the blankets outside the nest in the first place, and despite successful reintroduction, did that same sensory problem lead him to crawl under mom, in an effort to just get warm?
I doubt mom suffocated him intentionally, and at worst, another explanation was that mom accidentally rolled on top of him and he just wasn’t strong enough to escape.
Do these sound like reasonable explanations for his unexpected passing that night? It was so sad, and I had felt so optimistic from his successful reintroduction into the nest, it was very unexpected.
Thanks for your thoughts in advance!
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from Pets https://www.reddit.com/r/Pets/comments/q51nmx/wondering_how_my_kitten_runt_died_a_while_back/
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