Super Fleas: What Can Stop Them?
This is a guest post from a caring cat lover with flea issues…
For years we were very fortunate when it came to fleas. We gave our dogs their monthly flea medicine and never really had a problem. While there are lots of dogs in our neighborhood, we all did a good job of keeping the fleas under control.
Unfortunately, a few months ago we started fostering two very sweet, young kittens that were found without their mommy under a house. Fortunately for them, a no-kill shelter in our town heard about them and sent someone to collect the starving animals.
Two days later, we got a call and the staff at the shelter asked if we would foster the kittens. They would require special care since they were bottle-fed and required regular feedings. Fortunately, we were able to care for them and brought them into our home.
The kittens did not seem to have a flea problem when they arrived, but then the eggs hatched. We knew we had to wait a while, since they were not old enough for flea medicines. Later, we called the shelter and they gave us some recommendations on what we could do to stop the fleas. However, these were not ordinary fleas and nothing seemed to kill them. Before long, they started to get on our other animals. We continued to use our regular dog flea treatments on the adult pets, but they didn’t seem to be effective. After a while, we moved our dogs to K9 Advantix (or you can use generic Advantix for cheaper) and finally started to gain some headway and the got rid of the fleas on the dogs.
We got a different flea medicine from the shelter (Advantix is toxic to cats.) Since the kittens were too young to treat initially, so we had to wait until they were old enough. Once we were able to do the treatments, they did not work. Since then, we have tried sprays and even flea dip to make their situation better.
While the flea dip did the best job of taking out the fleas (we found around 20 fleas on each cat), we are still looking for a long term solution. My goal at this point is to continue treating all of the animals, our house and yard until we can break the vicious flea cycle.
Category: Assorted Kibble