How to pick a kitten?

So we chose a breed, we chose a breeder and now all we had to do was to pick a kitten! Firstly we decided rather quickly that we wanted two kittens from the same litter. Since we want to have social cats they will need company when we are away at work, that was our line of thought at least.

Our two kittens, Skadi and Styx at 4.5 weeks old

To introduce a cat companion later on when the first kitten is an adult can cause tension, stress and fighting. Therefore we decided to pick two out of the same litter. Just like with picking the breed that fits you, you should also be picking your kitten with your brain and not primarily with your heart (or even less, with your eyes).

The queen is a beautiful brightly red colored brown spotted Bengal, pretty and she know it! The sire is a silver spotted, chilled out and loving giant of a cat (he takes care of the kittens as well). From what our breeder has told us the combination of mating a silver with a brown is that the kittens are likely to get get very high contrast. It is going to be interesting to see, as with all Bengal, how they turn out.

We wanted the two most playful, adventurous and social kittens of the litter, preferably two that played with each other frequently. Even though the runt is adorable, it would not suit us since we especially want active and confident Bengals.

The litter had four adorable kittens, two definitely browns potted and two quite bright (most likely) brown spotted, and we were lucky to be selected to make our pick first. The litter had three males and one female, the gender has always been a non issue for us. Some claim a male and female get a long the best, rather than two of the same sex, but I have seen plenty that contradicts that so for us it was all about the personalities and how they got along together.

To date we have made two visits to the cattery and during visit number two we made our pick. The first visit was when the kittens were quite young, just under two weeks. That visit was primarily to check out the parents, how social they were and how they interacted with us strangers. Also during this visit we bombarded our breeder with questions about the parents, the breed, nutrition, the kittens, toys and yeah, pretty much everything we could think of. :) The second visit the kittens were almost five weeks. They had their eyes open and was exploring their kitty crib, during this time we made sure to handle all the kittens, observe them and ask the breeder about their personalities. We ended up picking the two most feisty ones and it happened to be the bight female and a brown male. The female we have decided to call Skadi and she is probably the wildest of the bunch. The male we picked we have decided to call Styx and he is not far behind Skadi, he even chewed on Ryans hands when he was in his lap!

Now we can not wait until we can get them home in mid April and our preparations have begun... are we prepared?

The Bengals are coming... soon