Has your cat been infested with fleas? If your cat is scratching itself more often than usual or if you notice tiny red spots on your cat’s skin, then your cat probably has fleas. When you cat has fleas, you want rid of the cat fleas and make sure they don't come back. The best cat flea treatments on the market today will kill fleas and continue to protect your cat for a full month.
Cat Flea Treatments
There are a number of cat flea products you can buy that will kill fleas. There are cat flea sprays, cat flea shampoos, flea combs and flea powders. The problem with these products is that they kill only adult fleas. To understand why this isn’t enough, you need to understand the secret life of a flea.
It begins when your cat brings flea eggs into your house, which it is has picked up by sitting or lying on the ground. When the cat comes in your home, some of these eggs stay on the cat, while others fall off.
The flea eggs soon become larvae and then pupae. The pupae soon spin a silk-like cocoon, which is just about impervious to all pesticides. In fact, the pupae can live in these cocoons without eating for up to a year before emerging as fully-grown adult fleas.
Effective Cat Flea Treatments
Only killing adult fleas is not enough for a cat flea treatment to be truly effective. If you want to keep your cat flea free, you need to also keep the larvae from becoming pupae. And to do this, you need a cat flea treatment that contains both an adulticide – to kill the adult fleas -- and an insect growth regulator (IGR) such as (S)-methoprene, which interrupts the flea’s life cycle so the larvae cannot molt and become those hard-to-kill pupae.
Long-Term Cat Flea Treatments
The other drawback of many cat flea treatments – such as shampoos and sprays – is that they will not provide long-term protection. This is why you can spray your cat one day, walk away convinced you’ve solved the problem, then examine the cat a week later and find that the fleas are back.
So, the best cat flea treatment consists of products that offer these three benefits – long-term protection, an adulticide and an IGR.
It’s important to understand that long-term protection is usually just 30 days. This means you will have to give your cat one of these flea treatments monthly throughout flea season.
There are two types of products that provide long-term protection and that contain both an adulticide and an IGR. The first group of cat flea treatments are those that are available only by prescription. The second set of cat flea treatments are the ones you can buy over the counter at your local pet store.
Even if you choose an over-the-counter medication, you will still want to consult with your veterinarian as only your vet can tell you which of these flea treatments would be best for your cat, given its general health, sensitivities, weight and age.
Prescription Cat Flea Treatments
The best cat flea treatments available by prescription only are AdvantageÒ Multi Flea and Tick Treatment for Cats, RevolutionÒ and Interceptor For CatsÒ. These medicines are more expensive than a shampoo or flea collar but they will also protect your cat from intestinal parasites such as heartworms, hookworms and roundworms. Naturally, you can get these only through a veterinarian.
Over The Counter Cat Flea Treatments
There are also some excellent flea treatments available at your local pet store. Included in this group are two oral tablets – Advantage and Program Tablets. Plus, there are topical treatments such as Frontline Plus for Cats & Kittens, Bio Spot® SPOT-ON Flea & Tick Control for Cats, Frontline TopSpot and Hartz UltraGuard® Plus® Drops for Cats.
In the case of the tablets, all you have to do is give them to your cat orally or crush them and put them in her food. With the topical treatments, you simply put one or two drops on the cat’s back behind its head.
The best cat flea treatments contain an adulticide and an insect growth regulator. These treatments kill adult flea and interrupt the flea's life cycle which protects your cat from fleas for a whole month.
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