We recently adopted two of the cutest kittens that ever walked on the face of the earth. The are little warm balls of gray and white fur with inquisitive eyes and a penchant for crawling onto your lap to cuddle. Unfortunately, they brought with them a tick or two and an entire thousand member flea circus whose high hopping hi-jinks and low ankle level bites were not cute at all! Thankfully, as a Lyme survivor, I have educated myself to do tick inspections on all my pets and was able to inspect and pull off attached ticks. The fleas were another thing all together. The fact that the kittens came with a free flea comb should have been an early clue that there might be an associated flea problem, but we had all been blinded by the fluff. We were forced to engage in flea combat.
We started fighting the fleas with a simple bath with flea-shampoo. Did I say simple? We had to bath the kittens one at a time in the bathroom with the door closed. The first cat began struggling for its life or at least to stay out of the water, while the second cat stood outside the door listening to the proceedings. You have to get the cat all wet, lather on a dollop of medicated shampoo, wait for a few minutes staring hostilely at each other, and then gently rinse it off. It is amazing how badly a little kitten can bite and scratch when confronted by a few inches of tepid water in a bathtub. The fact that you have to dunk them twice with an uncomfortable few minutes of hissing and hiding beneath the toilet in between makes the operation more than difficult. If I had realized how bad it would be, I would have worn those thick rubber gloves that you see in Nazi movie torture scenes.
As it was, I ended up with pink water from the blood of the scratches and bites on my arms [a CSI would have a field day in my bathroom!] and then had to repeat the blood bath with the second cat, if you can find it after it has has run away and hid in terror. You then have to comb and pick out the wet fleas from the cat’s coats. They don’t seem to mind that too much, but by that time they are wet and tired Cats definitely hold a grudge and for the next two days any “play-fighting” with the cats seemed to be a bit more realistic than it had been before the baths. As for the fleas, they were wet, clean, and very much -alive. Round one of this battle had been won by the fleas.
I next went to the local pet store and purchased two flea collars. I remembered a day when you could strap one those around the neck of your cat and be flea-free in a short time. Waiting for several itchy days, I began to wonder what was up and decided to do an experiment with the two long extra pieces that I had cut off while installing the collars on my cats. I placed them in a plastic zip lock bag. Finding a set of fleas to lock in with them was no problem. I then left the filled bag on my table, expecting to find a diorama of death filled with stiff legged carcasses by morning. It never happened. If I hadn’t gotten sick of looking at a bunch of fleas hopping around on flea collar ends in a plastic bag on my table and thrown them out on trash day, they would probably be hopping still. This skirmish was un-equivocally won by the fleas.
My next plan-chemical warfare-was an ominous strategy. After the flea collar fiasco and figuring that they wouldn’t sell anything over the counter that could kill a cat, I purchased some flea spray and got to work. By the time I had covered the second cat, the first cat had begun to shake and foam a substance that smelled like soap out of her mouth. I figured that that she had gotten into my dish soap and licked it. When the second cat began to do the same thing, I realized that I needed to get the spray washed off them STAT! This meant-that’s right-another bath. Details are similar to the first bath experience- except add foaming at the mouth to the picture and a screaming teenager wondering why I hadn’t looked the spray up on the internet before I used it on her babies!
Once rinsed, all foaming and shaking in the cats stopped. I, on the other hand, was a bit shaky and mad enough to foam at the mouth when I returned the flea spray for a full refund and suggested to the store manager that they shouldn’t sell substances that kill cats in their store! I was referred to their national website complaint section. This drew me online. On the internet I saw a Youtube video of a cat that had been poisoned by the same stuff and I realized that I was only one of many cat lovers doing battle with fleas. Again, a little plastic bag experiment with fleas and a spray of this substance failed to do anything to the fleas, but it sure made my cats sick! Another winning round for the fleas!
Leary of chemicals, I was now open to trying natural remedies but looking them up online first to make sure they didn’t have bad side effects. Buying expensive Diatomic Earth didn’t seem to have any effect and yet another plastic bag experiment found the fleas living happily for days on end while hopping around in the dust. $19.99 worth of dust and the slightly dusty fleas still reigned supreme.
Finally I began to find flea fighting strategies that actually worked! I built a nighttime flea trap by setting a Pyrex pie plate full of soapy water on a sheet of white paper under a little reading lamp, again via internet instructions, and that did the trick. It drowned and collected hundreds of fleas each night for a while. The tide was finally turning.
I took to sprinkling my carpeting with salt, waiting for a while, and then vacuuming it up. I began to vacuum obsessively several times a day, which seems to have sucked out the fleas and their eggs. I found an item online that talked about putting apple cider vinegar in your cat’s water to repel fleas. My cats wouldn’t drink water with vinegar in it-but I found that if I took a cotton swab, dipped it in the vinegar, and then rubbed a drop or two on their backs they instinctively licked it off. Getting that bit of vinegar into them seems to have done the trick. We still have the cutest cats around but have lost the flea circus!