Daft question re flea treatments

[glittercat]

Hey all

So normally I find it impossible to do flea treatments on the cats so I usually pop them over to the vet nurse once a month. They have their flea treatments and their claws clipped.

However have to do it on my own now and finding it difficult to keep them still, part the fur to find any skin (their fur is short but very dense) and squeeze the liquid out.

So I've done the girls today but one of them jerked forward as I squeezed the vial so the treatment is on her shoulder a bit...


It probably tastes very unpleasant but if she can reach it when she's grooming is that a huge issue?

Thanks...

 

[di and bob]

If she reaches it, it will be VERY unpleasant. She will race around and foam at the mouth, I had this happen a couple of times. It will not permanently harm her, but is nasty. If you can keep her from licking that area until it is dried, you should be fine. I learned to put it high up almost between their ears to avoid this. On short-haired cats, just push it into the fur to the skin line and drag it down while squeezing. I had to learn to do it fast on my outside cats. I got a prescription for Profender which gets tapeworm too, which many cats get from mice and rabbits. Get your meds online from sites like PetMeds, they are half the price of the vets. If your cats are indoors, you don't have to worry about worming. worms need a host to complete their life cycle, usually rodents. Worming an inside cat monthly is unnecessary and hard on a cat unless it is outside.

 

[glittercat]

Well I did the treatments about half hour ago and so far all seems to be OK, no sign of foaming etc. If anything they don't now seem bothered at all, unlike Anubis who was very wary and suspicious for hours after his!!

Good tip about doing it higher up, I will remember that!

 

[Paris Pluto]

It also gets easier and easier the more you do it! At the start, I was freaking out because it got mostly the fur but over time, it'll be like second nature

 

[MissClouseau]

Those things taste bad. Usually when they clean it they take breaks so they don't consume it all at once. You can still try to wipe it off a bit. Maybe like stroking with a bit damp hands if your kitty doesn't like wet wipes.

I can't say this is the best method but if your cats have short hair, and you use a spot on-treatment that has a larger weight range and yours is on the lighter side of it, you can try doing it without splitting the fur. That might give you a bit time. I do that sometimes when my Hima runs away as soon as I split the fur. I wait for her to come back then apply the treatment without splitting the fur as she runs away again if I split the fur again.

For example, I use Stronghold on Hima. Stronghold is for cats 2,6 kg - 7,5 kg. Hima weighs about 4,5 kg. If half of the tube makes it onto her skin, it's still effective. I don't split the fur but squeeze it all on the same neck spot as close as possible. Open the tube's opening as wide as possible so one squeeze will take all the liquid out as fast as possible.

The easiest would be while they are sleeping but personally I don't like doing it then (I don't want her to feel unsafe when she sleeps). Instead I do it when she's eating something smelly she rarely eats so she gets too excited to get a bit distracted. Like this month I used Fortiflora on a complementary chicken-rice water Schesir wet food. Not a foolproof method, sometimes it fails big time, but so far it's been the least traumatic for both me and Hima.