No. Regular milk can cause diarrhea or an upset stomach. If you're bottle-feeding, we would recommend kitten formula.

It's going to take a lot of time. Depending on their age, kittens need to be fed very frequently—every two to three hours. Because their stomachs are small, so you can't feed them a lot of volume at one time. Therefore, they have to be fed very frequently.

Not if they're adequately weaned from the mom, and not if they're at the appropriate age to eat regular kitten food.

That’s generally around six to eight weeks old. When you start offering them some softer or gruel-type feeding, they're going to begin to eat that more and then nurse less.

When we vaccinate your kitten, we are doing a complete physical exam. We're making sure to the best of our ability that that kitten is healthy. And again, vaccines ... we're asking the body to respond to that. And so if you vaccinate a kitten that is not well or that is sick, then their immune system is fighting off that sickness. And so when you give a vaccine, it can't mount a proper immune response. We're checking the kitten’s temperature. We are doing a full physical exam to ensure that they're healthy enough to take that vaccine.

Great question. In an ideal world, your kitten wouldn't be exposed to other cats until they're fully vaccinated, which would be two weeks after their last set of shots here. That would be around four and a half to five months old. Now, can they go outside and be monitored? Sure. But they're going to be at higher risk until they're fully vaccinated.

If your kitten misses a vaccine, then let's just catch back up where you are. It is vital to get boosters on a specific timeline and a particular schedule because that's how the vaccines are labeled and recommended to give. But if you do miss that, then we're just going to boost that immune system right where your kitten starts back.

Yes. Great question. I'll just start by saying that when we give a vaccine to a kitten, we ask the kitten’s immune system to respond to that vaccine and mount a response so that if they're ever exposed to that disease, they can fight it off. That being said, some are over-reactors, and the immune system may overreact. That would be one of those side effects that are not common but can be seen. And then the lesser side effects would be just injection site soreness or tenderness. They might be a little lethargic. You can think about how you feel if you run a fever. You just don't feel well. You feel a little crummy. Sometimes that can happen for a day or two after their vaccines.

Every three weeks until they're around four months old.

The non-core vaccines are more what we would call a lifestyle vaccine. Some might say the Leukemia vaccine is a non-core vaccine, but kittens are the most susceptible. If they're going to be strictly indoors and they're never going to see another cat, then that wouldn't be something we would continue to recommend for your kitten as they get older. There are other vaccines that, depending on their risk, we might recommend depending on your situation. Bordetella is a respiratory vaccine that we do consider. We recommend it for all cats because we feel like it keeps them safe and they get fewer respiratory diseases, but it is not a core vaccine.