Minerva's Story Surviving Cleft Palate

Few things will make a breeder’s heart sink like weighing a neonate the day after birth and seeing a decline in weight

- Michelle Pelligrino

You quickly play over everything in your head: the temperature seems okay, she is vigorous, her mom seems to have plenty of milk, all of her siblings gained weight. So, you open her mouth to investigate further. Then you see, or in my case, I actually didn’t see, a palate. There wasn’t one. Where the roof of the kitten’s mouth should have been, there was just an empty void.

My Calico Exotic Baby Had a Cleft Palate.

There are varying degrees of severity when a kitten has a cleft palate. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for breeders to see some occurrence of this defect at some point in their career. Reasons for the defect vary. Incomplete closure of the palate is attributed to inherited, nutritional, hormonal, mechanical (in utero trauma) and toxic (including viral) factors.1 Whatever the reason, it is a sad and potentially fatal situation to face just as you are rejoicing over a beautiful new life.

When I opened the mouth of my cleft palate baby for the first time, I felt sick. She had one of the worst-case scenarios; there was no palate present at all. I reached out to some other breeders for advice, as well as a veterinary technician friend who I knew had dealt with this in the past. The consensus was not encouraging. People expressed concern about potential other underlying conditions. There was also a fair amount of concern that the kitten would suffer from issues secondary to her care, such as infections, aspiration from tube feeding, etc. Euthanasia would not have been a wrong decision.

“Just one feeding. . .”