We know that you’d prefer if your little adorable kitten never grew out of kittenhood and into full-fledged cathood. This, however, is simply an inevitable process that your little precious kitten is going to go through. Although when a kitten stops being a kitten may seem like a discussion in semantics, there are some very real consequences to your little kitty growing up, and we thought we’d share a bit about a kitten’s development with you.
When Your Kitten Will Move Like An Adult Cat
According to an article on The Nest about a kitten’s progression into adulthood, there’s no exact timeline that we can follow. In general, though, we can work off of a rough timeline that will chart the growth of our kittens, and will do so, more or less, accurately. The first step (no pun intended) that your kitten will take toward becoming an adult cat will be to start moving like adult cats move. This will take place relatively quickly, usually at around the 6-week point. The adorable stumbling and rolling will change into the delicate and precise feline movement that we typically associate with adult cats. Though it also varies, you kitten will then likely reach full adult size at roughly the 6-month point. From here, your kitten will at least look like a cat, but in several important ways it’s still very much just a kitten.
When Your Kitten Will Reach Sexual Maturity
Usually around the end of the first 6 months, your kitten will begin to enter puberty, where it will begin manifesting the physical and behavioral signs of sexual maturity. These will include heat cycles for female cats and urine spraying for male cats. This period can be thought of as the “teenage” period for your cat, where the biological hardwiring is telling it to do or feel things that it doesn’t necessarily have experience with or understand. Though your kitten is now another big step toward becoming an adult cat, it’s not quite all the way there, yet.
When Your Kitten Will No Longer Be A Kitten
When your kitten will no longer be a kitten, but an entirely developed adult cat, physically, sexually and, not to be forgotten, socially, will come around the one year to 18 month period. Here is when you’ll see those possibly aggressive tendencies that arose during your cat’s entry into puberty beginning to subside. This is your kitten finally acclimating to all of the various stages of its growth and development to the point where it’s more or less comfortable in its paws. You remember when you finally “came into your own” or “found yourself,” and this is very similar to what your cat is experiencing, as it finally becomes a cat. And, there you have it.
