Jordyn Purpura started out smuggling orphaned raccoons into his childhood bedroom. Twelve years of neonatal fostering later, he’s in his final year of veterinary school, chasing a gap he kept running into from both sides of the exam table: almost nothing in veterinary education begins before eight weeks of age.

As a foster parent, that gap sounded like a doctor saying there wasn’t much anyone could do. As a shelter worker placing bottle babies, and sometimes being the one present for their euthanasia when no foster could be found, it looked like an entirely preventable loss.

For a long time there was a defensible reason not to push harder on kitten medicine: it doesn’t matter what a veterinarian is willing to diagnose or prescribe if there’s nobody to take that kitten home and feed it every two hours. Jordyn’s argument is that this excuse has quietly expired. Foster networks have grown, nurseries have opened, funding has followed. What hasn’t caught up is the reflex — too small for blood work, too small for imaging, too small for a medication that was never labeled for a body this size.

That reflex has a body count. Kittens remain the animals least likely to leave a shelter alive, not because their medicine is impossible but because almost no one was taught it. Jordyn is teaching it now, to veterinary technicians, to emergency teams, to his own cohort. And he’d like the rest of us to start asking for it out loud.

• Why veterinary education effectively starts at eight weeks, and what that costs kittens
• The emotional weight shelter staff carry when there’s no foster available
• Bringing tube feeding and neonatal husbandry onto hospital nursing teams
• What the UC Davis famciclovir research showed about recovery times
• Congenital hypothyroidism as an overlooked cause of “failure to thrive”
• Getting creative with diagnostics instead of calling a kitten too small for them
• How fosters and rescues can push their veterinary partners toward more
• Why generational openness matters more than age when shifting practice

Resources & Links

• Vernau Laboratory at UC Davis
• UC Davis Feline Pediatrics on Instagram
• Jordyn Purpura on Instagram — The Vet Med Couple
• UC Davis Fracture Program for Rescue Animals
• Orphan Kitten Project at UC Davis
• Orphan Kitten Club