Determining the Age of Kittens

Video Transcript

"If you want to know the age of a kitten, there's several little things you can look for. If it's a newborn kitten, it's a little bit more difficult outside the fact that if you obviously if a kitten was just born, you can age it, but if it doesn't have it's eyes open, you know it's less than 10 days old. Usually eyes start to open around 7 to 10 days. It's ears, it starts hearing usually about 2 weeks but it has all it's fur and it's able to move around, they're not actually able to crawl or walk until about 2 or 3 weeks anyway so that might be another thing. But as a kitten gets older, let's say you just got a kitten that somebody said oh here's a new kitten, it's 8 weeks old and you kind of want to know for sure, one of the things that their eyes actually change color around 8 to 10 weeks. Sometimes new kittens will have a bluish color tint to their eye and then it will start changing into the all variations of color that normal kittens have or normal cats have after 8 or 10 weeks. Then also you can use their teeth to determine how old they are. There's a chart that I've put together that explains a little bit about the different ages as when their, these are the permanent teeth come in and the incisors, the front teeth, those usually, the permanent teeth usually come in in anywhere from 3 and a half to 4 and a half months of age. So that's around 16 weeks. The canine teeth, kittens, cats, do you have canine or dog canine teeth which are the big fangs, those usually don't come in until 5 and a half or 6 months. Again the permanent teeth, the little ones will fall out and by 6 or about this time, they'll also have a full set of teeth because the premolars, the teeth back in the back that you see, the grinding teeth, are between 4 and 5 months of age. Given the fact that you can kind of correlate the teeth but also the kitten's growing at this point too. So many times I'll take an average weight or I'll take the weight of a kitten and a rule of thumb that's fairly close unless there's been some obvious problems that the kitten hasn't been fed well, is most cats gain about a pound a month. So a three month old cat will be about 3 pounds. A 5 or 6 month old cat will be about 5 or 6 pounds. I mean it could be 8 pounds, it could be 4 pounds, but just as a rule of thumb a pound a month might give you a rough idea up until they're about 8 or 10 months old."