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My Cats Got Fleas!

Your cat having fleas is no great surprise if she goes outside, but what you need to know if that she doesn’t need to keep them! Nor does she need to keep getting them because although you can’t stop fleas from jumping onto your cat when she’s outside, what you can do is to take appropriate measures to stop any fleas that do get into her from reproducing and making her life a misery.

Fleas feed on blood, and just as we get irritated with a place where a mosquito has bitten us, so cats scratch when a flea has bitten them. Not only is it uncomfortable for them, but it can also create other health conditions – for example, some cats are actually allergic to fleas and this can reveal itself by your cat showing signs of skin problems.

So what can you do? Well the first thing is to ensure that your cat is flea free. Make time every day if possible, but at least every few days especially during the summer when you spend 5 minutes combing her with a flea comb. This will alert you to any flea problem she may have, and also remove any fleas that have jumped onto her that day. Next she needs to have some form of protection, such as a flea collar. This will help deter the fleas from hopping on in the first place. Once they are on, one of the best things you can do is to have your cat protected with some form of medication that can be applied once every month or so into the back of her neck, and this produces a chemical which will kill any flea that then takes her blood. It doesn’t stop that flea from making the bite, but it stops it biting and producing any offspring!

Further action you can take is to try to bath your cat. This isn’t a fun job – in fact it’s rather a thankless one for most cat owners, but if you’re up to it, then bathing your cat using a specially formulated shampoo will not only kill any fleas still on her, but will also leave a scent that the fleas outside will avoid for a short while at least.

Lastly, make sure that you keep her bedding clean. Launder this every week or so, and also every time that you apply a flea treatment on your cat. If you are using a flea spray to de-flea an infested cat, use the same spray on her bedding to ensure that any flea that jumps off her into the bedding doesn’t live to jump back on!

Fleas can make summer a miserable time for your cat so get onto it as the Spring ends, and find out what treatment will work best for your cat, fix a schedule for ensuring that she’s flea-free and you should all have an itch-less summer!

This entry has been submitted by Si Wilkinson. Si is also one of the three orginal writer on A.B.B.4 and has started to become a authority concerning mole removal UK .