Never put tea on a kitten's eyes

A kitten turns up with its eyes stuck shut and somebody suggests cooled black tea on cotton wool. It is cheap, it is in every kitchen, and it looks like it works: the crust softens and the eye opens. The crust was never the problem. A newborn kitten with sealed eyes almost always has an infection behind the lid, and an infection behind a sealed lid is under pressure. Wiping the outside clears what you can see and leaves what you cannot. Tannins are also mildly astringent on a surface as thin as a kitten's cornea, and a cornea that has been scarred does not un-scar. What to do instead: warm water on clean gauze, one wipe per eye, one gauze per eye, from the inner corner outwards. That is a holding action to get you to a clinic, not a treatment. If both eyes are sealed, if there is any yellow or green, or if the kitten is under four weeks old, that is the same day, not tomorrow. The reason we keep saying this is that the ones we see too late are almost never neglected kittens. They are the ones somebody was trying hard to help.