How to Tell if a Cat is Pregnant

This is Nala she's a British short haircut who was 47 days into her estrus cycle. There were several signs that led me to believe she is pregnant without having to go to the vet and today I'm going to share with you all of the symptoms of cat pregnancy from my personal experience. It's important to note that the average length of pregnancy in cats is 65 days but it can vary from 61 to as long as 72 days if you know exactly when your cat was last in heat stay tuned until the end of this article as I will share with you the app I use to track all of my cats pregnancies. 

Hi my name is Dadibattini Narayana welcome to kitty cat soul food and in today's article I'm going to explain to you how to tell if your cat is pregnant without having to visit the vet so let's get into the article. So the first way to distinguish whether or not your cat is pregnant is to actually determine whether or not your cat was in heat now if you already know your cat was in heat then the next five or six points in this article will be helpful to determine if she's actually pregnant. But if you have no idea if your cat was in heat there are a few indicators you can use to help determine if may be she was in heat. So the first indicator would be the time of the year. So if you're watching this and it's the spring time or the fall time then most likely she has gone into heat these are the prime months for cats to go into heat because of the rising temperatures so there is a possibility that she could have gone into heat but you just weren't around to witness it and the second indicator would be how old she is so if you have an adult cat then most likely she's already gone into heat multiple time it's because she has already gone through puberty but just keep in mind that cats they only have to be 80 percent of their adult weight in order to be going into heat into puberty so they can be quite young still and still going to heat so if you think your cat is pregnant in fifty or sixty days has passed and you notice you've gone into heat all of a sudden then it's possible what you thought was a pregnancy was actually just a pseudo pregnancy which is like a false pregnancy. Now the earliest and most reliable sign that your cat is pregnant is what's called eat pinking up of the nipples. Now this usually happens around 15 to 18 days after ovulation so it is one of the earliest ways to detect pregnancy in cats what I would say is if it's your cat's first time being pregnant it's super easy to tell because prior to pregnancy they usually have very flat white nipples and you can see like a substantial difference you can see that they're pink or almost like a red colour and if it's your cat's second or third time having babies then it could be a little bit harder to tell because sometimes after their first or second pregnancy the nipples they stay enlarged and they don't always go back to the way they were before so that's the only situation I would say it can be a little bit more difficult but you can use a sum of different symptoms to try to determine if they're actually pregnant. Another thing I wanted to mention is that as the nipples begin to change the hair will actually recede away from the nipples so that when the kittens are born they can easily find the milk so this could be another sign like your cat could be laying down on their side and you just notice all of a sudden that their nipples are poking through their fur for example like in my cat Nala you can see here that her nipples are clearly poking through so it's pretty obvious that she's pregnant before this pregnancy you couldn't even tell like where her nipples were on her body so it was pretty obvious to me once I saw this. 

So another sign that your cat is pregnant is an increase in appetite and an increase in sleep so from my personal experience especially with Nala right now she is eating like crazy she's bagging for food every single day more than normal so I would say like if you notice like any abnormalities like the cat is coming to more often for food and they just seem like they're crying and begging for food a lot then they're probably pregnant also they will sleep a lot more you might find them in places that they typically wouldn't sleep in like with knowledge she now sleeps on the bed or she'll go in my closet and sleep and these are places that she would have never slept before her pregnancies. Lastly some cats might experience morning sickness much like humans when they're pregnant cats can also fall ill in the early stages of the pregnancy even to the later stages. This usually happens because abdomen enlarges and puts a lot of pressure on their digestive tract so they can cause them to puke and get a little bit nauseous so again with my experience with Nala she was puking like a couple times a week what looked like and white foam so I asked my vet and they verified with me that this is just from her pregnancy and the expansion of her stomach so this is also something to look out for which leads me to my next point which is the bulging of the abdomen so around 35 to 45 days you're gonna notice that your cod stomach is growing the kittens are getting bigger they're getting lots of nutrients they're healthy they're growing and so you're gonna notice that sometimes when they're laying on their side their stomach kind of like sticks out to the side and so this is a sign that they're  pregnant but it's obviously not until later in their pregnancy that you can see this so I usually use this as like a secondary sign after the nipples around 20 days and then when it's like 45 days I see the stomach bulging it's like almost a hundred percent sure that they're pregnant now something to keep in mind is that around 50 days or like almost a week before they give birth you will notice if they lay on their side some movement in the stomach so that's a healthy sign but it's also like a sign that they could be going into labor within the next few days so I'm gonna do a separate article on the signs your cats going into labor but if you see movement I mean it's pretty clear that your cats probably pregnant if you're skeptical of the buldging and you think that it's possibly worms or like a parasite or something I would advise you to at least go to the vet and get an x-ray if the cat is over 40 days pregnant they will be able to detect kittens in the x-ray by the amount of skulls that they see so it's not always accurate they can't always tell exactly how many kittens but you'll at least be able to tell 100% for sure whether they're pregnant or not. Another sign that your cat is pregnant is a change in her behavior so a cat that was once distant might become super affectionate and vice versa so if you have noticed your cat acting super loving and purring all the time coming to your chest and wanting attention then that could be a sign that she's pregnant but usually I don't notice the until later in the pregnancy one thing that I might say a little bit earlier it's a little bit of aggression so if you have other cats in your household I do notice that the pregnant cats tend to get a little bit more aggressive towards those cats they kind of like claw at them a lot more those are just some behavioral changes that I've noticed from my experience but something else to look out for lastly is nesting behaviors so towards the end of the pregnancy you might notice that your cat is going in discrete places that they normally wouldn't have been in such as a dark closet a laundry basket or even on top of the washer and dryer sometimes they'll claw blankets or towels or try to find like a little place that they can call like their own for when they're ready to give birth to the kittens so if you notice this it's like a sure sign that the labor is soon to come so that's like the last sign that you could possibly see that they are for sure pregnant and that's it for this article. I hope you guys learned something new and hopefully you too can now determine whether or not your cat is pregnant don't forget to Like for more weekly cat articles thank you so much for reading and stay positive bye. Wait before you leave I'm gonna show you the app that I use to track all of my cats pregnancies so let me just open the app here on my phone so I'm gonna go to the App Store in the app it's called pet pregnancy so I'm just gonna type pet pregnancy. It's the first app that comes up it's the only app available to actually use so there's no other options I'm just going to open it so the first thing you see is the calculator so here you're going to select what kind of pet so most likely it's a cat if you're reading this article I'm gonna put in the name so for example I'm gonna put in Nala even though I already have her logged in here and her mating date was on the 31st of November so 2019 I'm gonna press submit and it says now Nala will give birth on February 4th 2020 and so do you want to save this pet to your pet list so I'm gonna say yes and then afterwards it's gonna show you the delivery date the minimum delivery date and the max delivery date so the delivery date is sixty-five days exactly sixty-five days from the first day they were gonna heat but cats can be in heat up to one week so you don't know exactly which day they got pregnant which is why they offer like a minimum date and a max date so the minimum date is more like around sixty days into the pregnancy and the max is around like 70 69, 70 days so I can see here that Nala would be due on February 3rd and her minimum due date would be 30th of January and her max would be the 8th of February so if you want download the app and you can keep track of your cats pregnancies as well you know that what you want some chicken you want some chicken.