Flea Attack

If hair loss is a common internal hygiene issue for cats, flea is a common external hygiene issues for them.

Fleas can be attracted to cats from outside or in the house. Actually, because of their body characteristics and life cycle, only 5% of the fleas inside the house actually live on the cats; the other 95% stay on carpets, furniture and even the bed.

Fleas’ Body Characteristics

Fleas are a kind of small (1.5 to 3.3mm long), dark-colored (usually reddish-brown for cats) wingless insects that survive on warm-blooded animals, specifically mammals (including cats, humans and birds), as external parasites.

Fleas have mouthparts that serve a dual function: on the one hand, it can pierce skin surface and suck blood from the blood vessels; on the other hand, it can bite the host and inject its saliva into the bite. Sometimes the saliva may contain various pathogens, thus spreading diseases from host to host.

Fleas can be anywhere. By virtue of the spring-like mechanism in their body, they can jump at an acceleration of 130 times more than that of gravity even though they cannot fly. Fleas can jump vertically up to 18cm and horizontally up to 33cm.

Fleas’ Life-cycle

Fleas’ life cycle also help them propagate widely. There are four major stages in the cycle, namely egg, larva, pupa and adult.

Flea Egg – Female fleas lay eggs within two days of their first meal. They can lay over 500 eggs within several months.

Flea Larva – when flea larvae emerge from the eggs, they can feed on any available organic material, such as dead insects, feces, and vegetable. They are blind at this stage and avoid sunlight, and survive in dark places like sand, cracks and beddings.

Flea Pupa – When the larvae are supplied with enough food, they can pupate and weave a silken cocoon within one to two weeks after three larval stages.

Flea Adult – After one week or two from the pupa stage, flea pupa will develop into adult, and are ready to emerge from the cocoon. The flea adults may remain rest before breaking the cocoon and wait for the signals from a host nearby. The signals can be vibrations (such as sound), heat (warm-blooded animal), and carbon dioxide (exhaled gases).

Once the adult fleas are ready to emerge from the cocoon, they have around one week to find a host and feed on blood from the host in order to reproduce. They can survive from two months to a year between meals. In case they find no host and food, the fleas can survive up to two months without eating.

Measures to Attack the Fleas

Having known fleas’ special body design, life cycle and widespread propagation ability, we will see that tackling the fleas issue does not rest on cats’ hygiene alone, but also their surrounding, especially our living environment.

1. Cleaning the House

As mentioned, 95% of the fleas rest in the house, so it is important to clean the house thoroughly and effectively. The best way is to get rid of the as many as possible the source of fleas, namely the eggs, larvae and pupae.

One way to do this is to vacuum the entire house with the use of nozzle attachment, which centralize the vacuum power. Aim the nozzle especially at carpet, rug, areas under every piece of furniture, bed and pet bed, corners, and cracks. These can be fleas’ ideal hiding areas.

Vacuum can also be a good stimulus as its vibrations can attract the developed fleas to break out of their cocoons, and thus captured. It is also a good way to remove flea cocoon because the cocoon is water-tight and may be immune to insecticides we may use.

Of course, we have to be careful to make sure that the vacuum bag and the contents of the dust barrel are properly disposed of after vacuuming. This is to prevent the fleas from leaking out of the bag and go into the house again.

2. Insecticides

Another way to control fleas is to use insecticides. As mentioned, insecticides may not be effective to water-tight flea cocoons, but they are effective to adult fleas. Insecticides such as insect growth regulators (IGRs) and insect development inhibitors (IDIs) contains either methoprene, hydroprene, or piriproxyfen, and are responsible for altering the life cycle of the fleas, and disabling their reproductive functions.

Like vacuuming, the chemicals should be sprayed on every carpet or rug, under every piece of furniture, and other corners. Once the insecticide is sprayed, we should allow it to take effect for around a week before vacuuming the house.

3. Cleaning the Cats

Apart from coping with the 95% of fleas habitat, we also need to cope with the most important 5%, which is the potential host – the cats.

One way to clean the cats is shampooing. Some shampoos contain effective flea-killing substances such as pyrethrins, pyrethroids and deltamethrin. Shampoos also remove from cats’ skin the dried blood and skin flakes on which fleas can survive.

Once the cats are cleaned and dried, top-spot treatment should be applied on cats’ back and between the shoulder blades. The ingredients of the treatment are effective in repelling fleas from resting on cats.

Alternative treatments include the more traditional flea powders and electronic collars, but they are less effective than top-spot treatment in that the former can only deter the fleas’ attacks without disabling their reproductive ability or killing them. Instead, the fleas are simply disturbed by these substances and jump outside of the house where the cats may again contact when you walk the cats.

Also note that some remedies such as garlic, B vitamins and Brewer’s yeast are shown to be ineffective in controlling fleas on cats.

These methods should be repeated for around two to three weeks with vacuum cleaners and shampoo in order that the fleas are completely removed from the house and the cats. Of course, care should be taken that the cats never contact any other animal that may be infested with fleas.

Keeping cats in good health not only extends cats’ life, but also save our money on veterinarian expenses when it is too late to prevent cats from illness.

To maintain cats’ health and prevent them from weakening by disease, we can pay attention to some signs, some changes in their life pattern, that may reflect they are attacked by some diseases. One of the patterns has to do with cats’ claws.