Animal Welfare Professionals

One of the best parts about being the Program Director with Target Zero is that I get to hear about great ideas from shelters all over the country. We do several online consulting sessions every week, so the ideas start to stack up. Recently, we decided it was time to start sharing these little "gems" here on the forum. Each week, we'll (try to!) post a new "Target Zero Tip of the Week." These may be small "nuggets" but those can often be the most effective.

So here goes.....

This one comes to us from Dawn, the Director of Operations at the Humane Society of Southern Mississippi (@opsdirector). Her shelter was having a particular challenge with unowned, unweaned singleton kittens. There had been a policy in place that kittens from different litters could never mix. Single kittens then ended up going into foster alone. They would continue to do poorly.

At some point, they decided to revisit their "never ever mix" policy, and challenged it. They start pairing singleton kittens with each other and sending them into foster care. To their happy surprise, the paired kittens did great. Rates of disease in this vulnerable population fell.

In addition this practices ultimately their capacity for housing foster animals (now instead of needing two foster homes for every two singletons, they could just find one).

The shelter also started treating the particularly small, poor-doers with liquid Capstar (nitenpyram), and found that the ultra-fast action of this drug helped to get these kittens off on the right foot.

I loved this story because it really highlighted the importance of behavioral enrichment for all populations. And, of course, nothing tires out a kitten....like a kitten.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to share!!

Keep at it, everyone.

--mike

We call them "only lonelies" and it is a priority when they do come into our program to find them a buddy!  Not only does being a single unweaned kitten contribute to stress and thus disease, it's far from ideal for their social well-being.  I currently have a "mosaic" litter in foster--the four kittens are convinced that they're siblings since they were raised together, but in fact, they're four only lonelies that I stuck together! 

It is important for me that I test the kittens for FeLV before sticking them together, but other than that...young kittens are socially very open to new companions and generally the hissing is minimal.  If I have a choice, I put a shyer, less socialized only lonely in with a more outgoing one, because the learning happily goes the way we'd like it to--as opposed to pairing two shy only lonelies.  However, when push comes to shove, any buddy is better than no buddy!

All great addional info! Thanks so much for adding to the discussion. Great stuff!

We used to have the "never mix" policy as well, but after we had several kittens with "orphan kitten syndrome" we decided to scrap that policy and pair up/group kittens as much as we could. For the larger kittens we usually test before putting together, but for the teeny tiny babies we don't. Our instance of FeLV is so low around here (thankfully) that it's highly unlikely we'll have a positive one at all, so the minimal risk is worth it.

We even pair up kittens if all but one finds a home, leaving the other alone. This has actually helped in increasing the number of people who take home two kittens instead of one. While we always encourage either adopting two together or at least having another willing feline playmate at home, having two kittens together when an adopter comes in tends to make them feel bad for leaving one behind, and many times both end up going together.

I find that fascinating. It totally makes sense. Did they FeLV test the kittens first? I know in shelter medicine we can't always do everything  but just curious. Thank you Dr Greenberg. 

While I don't usually mix litters because of health concerns, in my opinion a kitten catching a bug from another kitten is the lesser evil, than a kitten ending up with behavior problems and stress because lack of companionship. When I come across orphaned kittens, I always look for a feline mom first.