Any pet owners or Vetson the message board, which is the better flea treatment?
Especially for a dog in the tropics.
Frontline, no question. Bathing will work if you do it every 3 days or so. Frontline requires much less effort and so is almost certain to work. Let’s face it, no one washes their dog more than once a week no matter how good our intentions may be.
When I opend this therad I though it was referencing the PBS show/ Which may not agree with ones politics, but certainly better than taking a flea bath…
carry on
Brian
Frontline (produced by Merial), or similar spot-on preparation. The other ones here in Australia are called Advantage (Bayer), and Revolution (Pfizer).
Some also protect against heartworm and ticks, which are other issues to consider in the tropics. Some only work against ticks if applied more frequently than you would need to for fleas.
Flea baths are effective if done frequently enough but you have to be careful to prepare the product effectively.
If you have a problem with fleas, consider not just controlling them on your pet but in the environment - frequently launder pet bedding in hot water, flea bomb the house or steam clean your carpets, restrict access to any cool, moist earthy areas that your pet likes to lie in (eg under trees or under the back stairs) because these are potential flea breeding areas… and if there are fleas in the environment, then the animal can easily get re-infested, whether you are using spot-on treatments or baths.
Some spot-ons (Frontline Plus, Revolution) claim to be effective against eggs and larvae in the environment, too.
As a point to note - if you have environmental fleas, then spot-ons will not stop them from jumping onto your pet (they have no repellant action) and the fleas will have to actually bite before the spot-on drug kills them.
Flea control is best approached in an integrated fashion (in other words, concentrate on eliminating them from the environment as well as off the pet).
phraser, BVSc.
Frontline is EXCELLENT for ticks. We basically live in the woods, and Mr. S used to pull dozens of ticks off our dogs every day (yuck). Now we’re lucky if we even see one or two a month, and they never hang on long enough to get engorged.
Spraying the yard helps, work outward from the center as you are not necessarily killing the fleas but rather running them into the neighbor’s yards.i
There are several other products besides frontline which also work well. Biospot is cheaper and has been effective for my dog. It might not work as well on ticks. I used frontline for a couple of years and then it seemed to quit working. I switched to Biospot.
In general, Biospot and other “over the counter” flea products are not only inferior to the ones sold only in Veterinary hospitals, they can be dangerous in some cases.
Other threads I have seen on these boards have detailed some horror stories from people who have actually used them, but for a non-inflammatory link listing some reasons why over the counter or black market products are not advisable (and any box of Advantage, or Frontline purchased on-line or from a pet supply supply store is black market, because those companies do not allow their product to be sold outside of vet hospitals), check out this link:
Over the Counter and Black Market Products
For a comparison of Advantage, Frontline and Revolution:
For a general education about fleas and flea control:
Of particular interest to bannerrefugee is Lesson 4 on Flea Resistance, which will explain why Frontline might have “quit working” after a couple of years.
Good luck!
Thank you
I will ask my dogs Vet about this
I’m watching Frontline as I write this, and I can say with confidence that getting a flea bath is considerably better than being an Iranian student dissident.
Biospot and the other OTC stuff are just concentrated flea spray. As soon as your dog gets wet, the protection is gone. Also, putting concentrated pyrethrins on your pet puts him at risk for pyrethrin toxicity, which can result in tremoring, seizures, and death (and a damn ugly death, at that.) I won’t let those things in the same room with my pets after the toxicities I’ve seen at work.