What is the best way to kill them outside both in the yard and the outdoor carport that is open with a couch and chairs and 2 outdoor cats that “live” here? I’m open to anything short of atomic warfare. Have a huge yard but do I have to treat the entire yard or just out so many yards/feet/meters from the house and the actual yard I use?
Side note: Rented a house once and then realized it was infested with fleas. The landlord had the house treated by a local company 3 times and their were still fleas in there 3 weeks later when we went and looked. Someone suggested putting salt down so I spread salt throughout the entire house and 3 days later there wasn’t a flea anywhere. I had 3 dogs when I moved in and I never had a flea problem again after the salt.
consumer warning: wash rinse repeat… and vacuum up the salt before you use residence.
You need to treat the whole area, as much as possible. The thing is, fleas are hitchhikers, and will travel on the cats. You might want to consider a professional killer (exterminator), because fleas are VERY good at surviving.
Yep…these lil bastards are multiplying fast… in the house. I probably shouldn’t burn the hair off my arm to kill 1… but there were 2 and I didn’t burn my skin…young ones… a bad sign.
<i think i saw a thread about humane treatment of pests>… i wish i could torture to a long painful death every flea in this state… and yours… and then watch it be placed closer and closer to a low flame while its legs and head are burned off… settle down now… <yikes> and then a rusty needle poked into its abdomen… a tiny needle of course. what? are you that dense? It’s all tiny poking a flea! But sweet revenge! Ahhhhhhh!
Adams products were the best I ever used, but I never tried to treat an outdoor area. Once the inside fleas were killed off, Sentinel or whatever it was we used protected the pup from any more getting on him.
Using something like Frontline on your cats might solve the problem if it isn’t too severe; the fleas jump on the cats and die. The stuff is pretty expensive when buying from a vet – goes for $40 to $50 for three doses – however, notice that it is the same price for three Great Dane size doses … that’s the key to the eBay deals. They sell you the big size and send a little syringe to use to divide the dose down to cat size. I’ve been using it that way for years.
If the yard is badly infested, there are plenty of chemicals in the garden supply shop; something like Scotts Turf Builder with SummerGuard will fertilize the lawn and kill the fleas. There are also plenty of sprays at the garden shop that kill fleas along with all sorts of other bugs – stuff like Spectracide – for either wide area spraying or for just shooting around the outdoor furniture.
A quick way to find out if you really need to do a wide area assault is to walk around wearing white knee socks … if there are fleas, you will quickly see them jumping onto the socks.
You CANNOT use “spot-on” type product formulated for dogs on cats! NEVER do this! Use only a product specifically formulated for cats. Frontline for Cats is $33 for 3 doses, from Amazon, with no risk of putting your kitty into liver failure for saving $10. Each dose lasts a month.
I’m not sure if Frontline specifically has this problem, but off the top of my head I can think of two other products that you should definitely not use the dog version for a cat.
One is Advantage K9, and the other is Promeris. Both dog versions contain extra drugs that are set at doses that would harm cats, even if you adjust the amount you give by the main active drug.
So the simple advice is “don’t use products for dogs on cats, cats are not little dogs”.
Revolution is a spot on that works really well for cats and covers multiple parasites, including fleas.
But I remember NOLA has some knowledge of some anti-parasites, and didn’t you know how to prevent your dogs from heartworm with ivermectin? Ask your vet for the ivermectin dosase against fleas in cats.
I’ll grant that the dog and cat formulations aren’t exactly the same; they do have a very small difference in the proportions of the chemicals in the formula, but they both do contain exactly the same chemicals.
When I see a business that sells a product for $40 for small dogs and sells the same exact product for large dogs for $40, and the only difference is that the large dog package contains eight times as much of the exact same product as the small dog package … well, I have to assume that company’s marketing wizards are pretty freakin’ clever. I wouldn’t put it past them to be able to come up with the idea of changing the formula by a couple of percent one way or another and putting dire warnings on the package to prevent thinking people from trying to divide the bigger package into smaller doses for cats.
As for saving $10, I suggest the saving is more than that. You get 3 doses for $33 = $11 per cat per month. I get 8 doses for $20 = $2.50 per cat per month … unless I buy the 16 dose package for even less.
Did I mention that I have been using it for years? Perhaps my cats are in some sort of Schrödinger state but they certainly seem alive and healty to me … except for the one who died last year, but he was 17 years old and I have no reason to suspect it was flea-free and tick-free years of doggie Frontline abuse that killed him.
I also suspect that the hundreds of thousands of doses that have been sold on eBay in this manner have quite likely not resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of pussy cats … but yeah, you pays your money and you takes your chances.
I am yakking about Frontline only, not about other products.
Permethrin is highly toxic to cats. Apparently, there have been reports of cats being poisoned just by sharing a bed with a dog treated with a permethrin spot-on. In the UK, most supermarket flea treatments for dogs contain permethrin, and we commonly see cats poisoned by well-meaning owners who think a product that’s safe for a puppy will also be safe for a cat.