We let our cat out in our little back patio a few months ago, for a few hours. And now there are fleas.
We cannot figure out how to get rid of these fuckers. And they seem to think my wife is also a cat.
Have you been able to get rid of a flea infestation? How?
Been there, sorry about your luck. Here’s what I learned the hard way;
You can spend a lot of money trying several different folky remedies, none of which will prove fully effective. ‘Fully’, being the word to pay attention to. For every flea you can see, there are many, many more. Flea eggs are literally one of the most endurable things known to man!
After wasting all that time and money trying home remedies you’ll still end up paying a professional to come in and finally get the job done. After which you still must wash everything that will go in the washer and vacuum the entire home and immediately remove the vac bag and take outdoors!
I recommend you save yourself the aggrivation and jump right to the pros. I wish I had! More importantly the take away lesson is that’s it’s always easier and cheaper to avoid fleas (using collars, powders, or things like Advantage) than it is to deal with ridding your home of fleas. And you only need a couple to get indoors to rapidly reproduce and create an infestation, as you’ve learned!
Again, sorry about your luck, and wishing you Good Luck moving forward!
How much does it cost to bring the pros in?
If my cat goes away for a while, will the fleas go away? I read here and there that if only humans are around, they bite but can’t set up a breeding cycle. Is that true? The pupa can last for years, but will hatch when there are indicators of hosts moving around, which there still would be if the humans are still in the house.
At the time I did it, I think the pros cost me $125-$150, (1000 sq foot residence!) but that was almost 20yrs ago, it’s sure to have gone up, I should think.
I don’t believe sending the cat away will do any good whatsoever. When you have fleas you have flea eggs. You can see they are already biting your wife so I’m guessing it’s a true infestation. Time away from the cat won’t help with that. Plus, you’re kinda sending fleas to someone else, not cool!
Good Luck!
Apply Advantage every 3 or 4 weeks for a while.
A cat got into my flat once, and suddenly there were fleas everywhere. That was unfortunate, because my blood is extra tasty.
I got some flea spray (by the smell of it, it was pretty standard insecticide) and used it liberally over the carpet, as per the instructions. I also kept a bowl of slightly soapy water nearby to drop fleas I caught into it. You might not need that, but if they’re biting your wife, she probably will. Whenever I felt one on my skin I would put it in the water in the hope that most of the fleas that got any kind of meal would end up too dead to convert my blood into more eggs. You’ll find the soap is necessary, otherwise the fuckers will just float and probably climb out again, thanks to the water’s surface tension. Don’t bother trying to squash them. I think it was around this time of year that it happened to me, so I tried to keep everything as cold as possible to slow them down, too.
You can, of course, get flea treatment for cats. Maybe you can isolate the cat in a room particularly inhospitable to fleas (no carpets or similar materials for them to hide and lay eggs in), use something particularly intensive on the cat to hopefully kill all fleas on it, and meanwhile spray poison all over your home. I’d guess it won’t kill them all in one go, but they will die without food eventually, if you can find a way to keep them off the cat and kill any that attack your wife.
So, in summary, without a cat you can rid yourself of fleas for very little expense, and certainly without professional assistance. With a cat running around, I’m not so sure.
Boric acid swept into the carpet along with the advantage program is very effective and fairly fast acting. I believe this is what flea busters used to use. I haven’t used them in many years so not sure what they use now. We had 5 dogs who all played outside as well as a cat and no flea problem.
If they’re to the point of biting your wife, things are really bad because they’re so numerous kitty isn’t a sufficient food supply. They strongly prefer dog and cat hosts because they’re drawn to heat, and dogs and cats run a few degrees hotter than we do. You can do it yourself, but it’s going to take a coordinated multiprong approach and a few months to completely clear up.
Treat kitty. Advantage has the best prolonged flea kill of the stuff available for cats, and is less expensive than Frontline or Revolution. You might as well go to the vet and buy the 6-pack, because that way you get 2 extra doses free. Between the lower per-dose price of the box and the free doses, at our clinic you save about $5 per dose that way. You’re going to need the additional doses, so you might as well save the $40. It might not be a bad idea to also pop kitty a Capstar to jump start the process while the Advantage is soaking in and starting to work.
Treat any other animals that come into your house. It does no good to treat kitty and the house if you’re just going to have an ongoing flea reservoir in the form of an untreated animal coming in.
Set off foggers in your house. Make sure you get ones that have an Insect Growth Regulator (sometimes just listed as an IGR) and make sure you pay attention to the square footage each fogger is rated for and use enough of them. You’ll need to repeat this in about 3 weeks.
Treat your yard with Sevin dust or some other insecticide, so that you’re not carrying fleas in on your pant legs and shoes. This time of year, fleas will catch a ride on anything warm even if it’s not so warm as they’d prefer. Pay special attention to under shrubbery and similar areas. You’ll have to repeat this every few days, unfortunately.
After the foggers are done working, wash everything you can with hot water. Vacuum everything. Baseboards, the framework of your furniture, every little crack and crevice you can possibly get to. When you get done, take the bag to the outside trash, or empty the canister in the outside trash and then wash it in hot water. Do this again in about three days.
Do all of this as a single swoop–if you do it piecemeal, you’ll just flush the fleas from place to place without actually getting rid of them. Show them no quarter, and leave them no place to hide. You should see a marked improvement after the first round of Advantage and foggers, enough that you can be comfortable. But don’t get complacent, and stop treating stuff, because if you do you’ll wind up right back at the starting point in a couple of months.
Flea life cycle is 100 days. Just want to point that out as to why the recommended flea treatment for pets is 4 months. Also please be careful as to which topical flea medication you put on your kitty. Stick to vet recommended/sold products. Yes, they’re more expensive, but they’re safe for cats. Some over the counter stuff, and some stuff for treating the house, are pyrethrin based products that can cause seizures and death in cats. Items labeled for “dogs only” aren’t kidding, they can be truly deadly to cats. If you hire a service, make sure they use pet safe products, or keep the cat out of the house until all surfaces can be wiped down.
Everything CrazyCatLady recommends is what I also tell people. Your kitty needs treatment right away, a flea infestation so bad that the fleas are resorting to people means the cat is in danger of anemia, which can also land kitty in the hospital needing a blood transfusion.
I hope things work out. I hate fleas and am highly allergic to them! Oh the welts I get from flea bites. Not fun.
Ditto on CrazyCatLady. I’ll just say, in future, don’t let kitty out without Advantage.
You can get Advantage at PetSmart, PetCo, vets, or even, sometimes CostCo.
No, sending kitty away for awhile won’t solve at this point. You need the full treatment. You can do all of these things without a pro.
Animals should be out of the house while bombs are going - you could have them bathed then add the treatment. This will add expense, so it’s optional. OTH, it will speed things up, by removing fleas from equation faster.
Good luck.
Back in the days before topicals, we struggled mightily with fleas, tried every home remedy (essential oils, diatomaceous earth, herbs, you name it), and every commercial one including bombing the whole house. NO effect. My dogs were covered with fleas until the invention of Advantage.
After using Advantage on my dogs for 20 years (no fleas, ever), they picked up some on a road trip this summer. Advantage DID NOT WORK. Apparently I had been coasting in our personal little flea-free zone for some years, not knowing that fleas in many areas including mine have become completely immune to it.
My vet corroborated this. She no longer sells Advantage, for that reason. She prescribed me Trifexis, which did the job. This is a monthly pill, not a topical.
All the dog bedding and everywhere they lounge was vacuumed, then washed in hot water and dried in a hot dryer, or sprayed with an upholstery-type flea spray. The dogs were also washed and sprayed. This was just for an immediate knock-down relief – you just cannot get every egg, and you will be inundated in short order once again. Trifexis (and, at one time, Advantage and other topicals) works by the fleas biting the dog and then becoming sterile. Eventually (my vet told me three months), the cycles will have run their courses and you will be flea-free.
Trifexis is expensive. But worth it.
When this exact same thing happened to my indoor cat (got out **one time **and brought a flea invasion into the house) we hired a pro and he got rid of them lickety-split. The chemical they use (so I have been told and have no cite and too lazy to look at this moment) is flea juvenile growth hormone. It’s harmless to humans and cats – and harmless to fleas, too! The hormone makes them stay in the larval stage so they never mature into blood sucking adults. The larva die off after a while, and then you are flea free. I don’t remember what it cost, but it was affordable and worth every cent.
The house my parents had near the Mississippi River was periodically infested with fleas. Dad set off flea bombs approximately every six months while everyone was out of the house. Being just outside of New Orleans, there was no basement.
Open the windows, turn off the heat, have the cat treated
Thanks for the advice everyone. I’ll let you know what worked (if anything does… 
)
We were thinking about buying a house soon, but I don’t want to move while this is happening because we will just bring the things into the new place.
I’ve never encountered anyone who properly used diatomaceous earth and was unsuccessful. It has to be used alongside vacuuming, hot drying anything dryable, treating the pets, etc. And it has to be liberally distributed using a proper sprayer–which is a big mess–and used over a longer period than most people think.
But it is damn cheap, non-toxic, and totally worth a shot.
If it were just that you could pay $150 for a professional and be done with it, I’d say go for it. But it may well cost more than that, and a lot of people don’t solve the problem in one go. I’d try to the $30 solution first, and if it works, then you can be comfortable going back to it if you have a re-infestation.
I’ve had a few flea infestations in my life, and the little buggers always bite me far more than they bite my pets. I suspect there are some people who just run a little hot or whatever and become targets before they are the meal of last resort. Not saying that’s generally the case, or denying the urgency of the problem, but my anecdote at least shows that it isn’t categorically true that they only go after humans as a meal of last resort.
Our flea infestations were before Advantage (once we used that, it was no longer a problem).
Cat fleas prefer cats as their primary host. They will go to humans if they can’t find a cat. So with Advantage, the cat attracts the fleas, which die.
Before that, we had to give the cat a bath (he hated that) in flea shampoo, vacuum, use a room spray, and keep it up for weeks. The problem is that fleas have four life stages, and in the pupa stage nothing can kill them. Usually the pupa is about 10% of the flea infestation, and all you can do is wait from them to come out and spray them then.
But Advantage is the best way to go.
I just spent $200 on a 1800 square foot house. They also sold me 6 mouse bait traps. That was included in the $200 but I don’t remember how it was broken down.
I called them in after setting of a flea fogger in each room without success.