Yikes! Just discovered my cat has fleas. Help?

Go to your local pet store and purchase flea and tick drops to place on the back of your cat’s neck. If the fleas have infested your carpet or home then going to the vet for prescription drops will be your best bet as they are stronger.

For your home I would suggest using either a carpet powder or spray. Each one has special instructions you must follow for them to work appropriately.

Natural or homeopathic treatments, I’ve found, work better as prevention than cure. Using one chemical, and using it properly, can be safer than using ten different herbs.

If he isn’t infested with fleas, I suggest buying a good quality metal flea comb from your vet, the comb will pick up the fleas very easily and then place the flea in a cup of water with detergent or soap, the flea will die in the water. Pay particular attention to under his arms, lower stomach and tail. Cats love being combed and at the same time you are ridding him of excess hair which he would be ingesting when he grooms himself.

My cat would headbutt my hand when I combed him as he absolutely loved the feeling of the comb. If he has more than 10 fleas then I agree with gemiwings advice above because if left untreated the eggs will drop onto your floor and will hatch in the summer and your poor boy will feel very uncomfortable. Flea eggs look like a white grain of rice. Good luck!

The stuff you put on the back of their neck is good but not too fast. It has to be absorbed into the blood and then the flea sucks the blood and dies. If you want something that works immediately, I prefer powder. It stays on and keeps on working. It is not as invasive as the other stuff. You can also sprinkle it on the carpet, let it there for a while before you vacuum. It is impossible to vacuum it all so what is left behind keeps on working.

It’s all toxic, it just depends on how you want to handle it.

Agree with all of the above. My Persians are indoor dwellers and have never had a major flea problem. With the long fur they have to be brushed everyday anyway. The flea comb doesn’t reach down far enough on longhairs.

My cats are now allowed to go outside for this very reason. Once you’ve had a flea problem, you never want it again! All the above is excellent advice (we seem to have many cat lovers on Fluther), and I can’t stress enough how important it is to get rid of the problem at the source: the carpet and upholstery. I advise professional cleaning rather than doing it yourself.

search “fleas” on this site for more because fleas are what brought me to Fluther, and i have seen several more flea issues since (since 2½ years ago) and i have answered several. i have 3 cats and 2½ years ago they had a bad infestation which i did not discover until it was out of hand and i had bites all over my lower legs. i researched and learned all about fleas, their life cycle of laying about 100 eggs per day each and hatching. i went out and bought dips, shampoos, sprays for the rug, powders for the rug. the flea shampoos/dips for the cats did not one thing, but cause a lot of work and mess bathing the cats. saw fleas the next day with that. got frontline and treated the cats – it’s like a miracle but you still have to treat the environment. got plastic mattress covers and i would walk with the baby to the edge of the bed and then brush my legs off with my feet before getting on the bed. bought flea bombs and spent the night in a hotel with my 10 week old baby. i did not have to spend the night out but i wanted to let the bombs do their work. while the bombs were working i just left the cats outside, since it was summer. two days later, saw more fleas, and broke down crying because i was at my wit’s end, with a young baby and after spending all that time, money and research and nothing worked. i ripped up the carpeting in baby’s room. i called an exterminator and got a one year contract. the one year contract was only about 30 percent more than the “one shot” deal. you just have to leave the house for a few hours and let the cats out, and he sprays mostly low down so it’s not like a bomb which gets chemicals all over everything. let me tell you i did not see one flea for about 4 weeks, then i called them to come back and they did, and i never saw another flea again. i called them to come back a month later (third time) for good measure, just to make sure nothing was ready to hatch, and i have not seen a flea since.

i would definitely recommend an exterminator (not Terminix, which were a ripoff). i ended up ripping up all the wall to wall carpeting in the house because i did not like the idea of the chemicals being on carpeting that i would be walking barefoot on, and the baby would be crawling on. i now have washable floors.

to this day, in the summertime, if i see a black spot on something i have to touch it and made sure it’s not a flea.

Frontline. The older baths and remedies are more likely to cause complications. You can buy it online – Amazon has the best prices, better than 1800petmeds.

@pdworkin is correct. Amazon has the best price.

oh and the other thing i did was throw out my couch. all in all, between the over the counter stuff ($100 approx), the bombs ($50 approx), the night in the hotel ($100 plus tax and incidentals), the one year contract with the exterminator ($500) and not even discussing the cost of the couch which was only about 8 years old, the total cost to me was major.

Fleas are an annual event at our house in the fall. I have learned several things about fleas that may help. First adult fleas pretty much all just live on the cats, sucking blood and making eggs, most of which drop to the floor to be picked up by another cat. Sometimes they hatch in the carpet and make cocoons waiting to be picked up by a passing cat. The main thing is that Adult Fleas make the eggs and are the first thing you want to kill.
Now we are at a juncture. If you have wee ones in the house, it may take a little longer to knock out an infestation, but if not, you can go nuclear and knock the whole mess out in a couple weeks.

At the pet store get frontline pills. They kill all the adult fleas on the cat in about a day. Keep dosing the cat every several days to get the fleas that weren’t grown enough to feed. That takes care of the cats except to brush the beejeebers out of them.

Our vet says to control fleas in his office, he sprays the whole floor with Ortho Home Defense Max about twice a year. It kills the cocoons and larvae as they hatch. It doesn’t seem to have bad effects on me and I go barefoot on the carpets all the time. That is the nuclear option. Farm stores, have an indoor spray that is less toxic and according to the label is ok for use with children unless they are floor lickers

Vacuum at least twice a day with a strong vacuum like a Kirby or Oreck or anything with a beater bar and a hepa filter. This will suck up a lot of the excess pestacide and contain the eggs etc, but change bags and take them outside. To cut the cost of bags (I have a Kirby Bags are $$) I hose down the inside of the bag with bug spray to whack anything living and keep it in the garage until the process is complete.

It is also good to note that when an animal has a flea problem they will almost always pick up tape worms in the process. Tapes cannot be reliably diagnosed by a stool check so you should be on the look out for tape segments on the stool or around its backside.

Klingon patrol. LOL

Wonder if they had fleas on the Enterprise, some of those creatures they encountered looked furry enough to harbor huge colonies of the little devils.

Thanks so much, everyone! We have ordered frontline through amazon (thanks @pdworkin and @jca ) not just for my cat but for our other cat and dog. We’ve also been cleaning and doing laundry like crazy. Let’s pray this all does the trick. Thanks again! :)