Hi All

Hope you can help. I adopted two 7 month old rescue kittens a week ago. They are beautiful ginger boys but very timid. Anyway they are coming on leaps and bounds but are still very 'fraidy and one of them is a phantom pooper. He poops in corners of the room instead of in the tray and has also had a touch of diarrhoea. Anyway because of that I've moved them into the hall/bathroom area as it's a lot easier to clean rather than my spare room which has carpet!

I'm leaving the door open from the hall to the kitchen when I'm in the house and then shutting the door when I'm out so they can't poop all over my house. Theyve only been in the hall for a day but have been far far better already. They are curious enough to have a nose round the kitchen when before they were just hiding in the bedroom and I've only had one poop related incident and before it was about 5 a day. So I think it's progress

Anyway they've got 2 litter trays in their area and another one upstairs on the landing in case they get caught short and I've been scooping out the poos once a day, so I'd last done it yesterday morning. I noticed that in one of the trays this morning there was a bit of blood? It was bright red blood. Is this something to worry about massively. I've seen them both poop today in their other tray and they both had fairly solid poop and no blood in that so it must have been from yesterday. They were at the vets on thursday for a vaccine and I asked for some advice and the vet has given me some medicine to use on the one with diarrhoea. Which I have been but I think the other one might have had a little bit of it too because the vet said if you can't get it in the mouth put it on the nose so they lick it off, but the other one licked it off!!! That shouldn't have caused a problem should it? It was only a little bit.

They are both eating ok. They didn't eat much for the first two days but now are inhaling their food and they are drinking a bowl or so of water between them a day. They came to me with felix pouches and royal canin young neutered male dried food. They absolutely refused to eat the dried food so I swapped that for Purina pro plan kitten because I was told they had also eaten that before and they seem to love that. Over time I will switch their food for something a bit better quality but didn't want to upset them too much by doing that at the moment. They have two bowls of dried and wet mixed (each) a day and I'm leaving dried food down all the time and plenty of fresh water.

Is it worth trying them with something like poached chicken (I've read about people giving cats that) to see if it settles their little stomachs a bit? And if so really dumb question, how do I prepare it and what do I buy? I'm a veggie and haven't cooked chicken in about 10 years so am pretty clueless and I wouldn't want to poison my naughty kitties.

Sorry for this ramble but I'm a bit of an anxious new kitty mummy.

They sound lovely. Sorry I can't help much but I did read somewhere that mixing wet and dry together can cause upset tummies because they digest these different foods at different rates. However, I don't know if that's true...