What Happens After Kittens Are Born?

Video Transcript

"Let's talk about what happens after kittens are born. Typically the queen, or mother cat, is going to take this as a natural process. At delivery, about 65 days after a queen becomes pregnant, they start to deliver. They'll want to nest and they'll want to find a quiet place where they can be secluded. And so as these kittens are born, they have an amniotic sack around them, and their umbilical cord is still attached to the placenta, so the queen mother is going to remove that, all of that debris typically and as well as the umbilical cord. After that happens, the queen mother generally starts to groom or lick these cats to clean them off, these newborn kittens, and that stimulates them also to start moving a little bit, become active, and the ability to start nursing comes right after that. So once they start being stimulated, they will try to naturally look for the queen's nipples that are full of milk and to start the nursing process. The nursing process may take five to ten minutes, depending on how fast they nurse, sometimes longer. Then kittens, newborns that is, will generally start to go right to sleep, and to sleep that off, digest that food, wake up and want to start nursing again. So these kittens, newborns, will feed anywhere from every two to four hours, typically."