A Kitten's First Year: What to Write Down

A kitten's first year produces most of the documentation the cat will ever have — chip, vaccinations, neutering, early weights — and then the paperwork stops for a decade. Whatever you fail to capture in that first year is generally gone, because the breeder, the rescue and your own memory all move on.

The first-year list

• Microchip details — number, database, and whether registration has transferred to you.
• Vaccination history — dates and products. What the abbreviations mean if the card is cryptic.
• Neutering date and practice, which gets asked about for years afterwards.
• Worming and flea treatment already given before you took over.
• Date of birth, or your best estimate, flagged as an estimate.
• Early weights, which will never be this easy to collect again.
• What she was eating, and what the breeder or rescue recommended.

Ask while you still can

The breeder or rescue knows things nobody will know later: the actual birth date, what treatments were given and when, whether there were littermate health issues, how she was with other animals. Ask in the first month, while the relationship is fresh and they still remember which kitten yours was.

Write the answers into the record rather than into a message thread you will lose.

Set the passport up as a cat, not a small dog

CorePaw is species-aware rather than generic. A cat's passport shows indoor, outdoor or indoor-and-outdoor living environment; the tracker is called Activity rather than Walks; the toilet tracker reads Litter; and the vaccine information covers FVRCP, FeLV, chlamydophila and rabies. You can hide any section that does not apply to your cat, per pet.

Living environment is worth setting properly — see why indoor or outdoor belongs in the record. For a kitten it will probably change during the first year, and updating it when it does is the useful habit.

Weights, while they are interesting

Kitten weight moves fast and is easy to capture on kitchen scales. Measurements chart it over time with change since the first reading, and the same screen handles the nine-point body condition score with a guided picker whose descriptions are written for cats rather than dogs.

Later in life, a weight history going back to kittenhood is genuinely useful context. Almost nobody has one.

The litter tray, early

The daily care log's litter tracking — wee, poo or both with a consistency scale — earns its place in the first months, when diet changes and settling-in upsets are frequent. Later it becomes the baseline you compare against when something changes; see litter tray changes worth writing down.

Photographs, and the honest reason

A kitten is a kitten for about four months. The per-pet album keeps them somewhere findable rather than scattered through a camera roll, and it is the feature people mention years later.

General information about record-keeping, not veterinary advice. Vaccination, neutering and worming decisions belong with your vet.