RAISING DEXTER

Dexter was my first attempt at raising a kitten without a mama. I was lucky to be able to foster him from a local shelter when he was about 4 weeks old. They supplied me with instructions and all the stuff, like kitten milk, bottles and food.

I had to bottle feed him with kitten milk formula. But that didn't work out to well. I had watched how it was done but couldn't master the technique. I then went to the eye dropper method to squirt the stuff in. That worked until I was able to mix the milk with wet food. As you can see in the pictures he has some food around his snout.

Luckily for me he loved to eat and gave me no trouble. And once he started eating the Science-diet dry food, he picked it up a notch and went zooming around the room.

He was still the property of the shelter so I had to bring him in for the Vet to checked out periodically. He had been given a flea bath before I got him but that didn't do the job because he still had some. He was scratching and so was I. Shelter told me to give him a flea bath. I did twice with Dawn dish soap. He still was scratching.

At the time I had brothers Larry and Curly so I called their vet up and she told me Dexter was old enough to use something like frontline to kill the fleas. Some hours after using it I combed 13 dead and dieing fleas out of the little long haired bugger.

When I brought him in for his shelter visit I got bawled out for giving him the frontline. Saying he was too young and going to my own vet. But it did the trick with no more fleas on Dexter and the house. I also got embarrassed when the vet asked about Dexter's brown nose. I said it seems to have gotten darker. She started examining it and found out it was encrusted food that made it look brown. After she scraped it off there was a pretty pink nose.

Anyway things worked out and Dexter grew into a handsome long haired independent minded cat.