Comments

1. 

   Kelly Furgason

   Yep, fleas can find their way into your home . Many ways this is possible, visiting friends and family coming into your home may be coming from a home with pets that have fleas and the fleas simply hitch a ride with them. You can track fleas into your home if you’ve gone in a location where other pets have been, fleas can hitch a ride on your clothing and hop off when you get home. Fleas are great at location hopping. Also if you have carpet in your home and have had pets with fleas before, flea eggs can actually lie dormant for a long time and vibrations from a vacuum cleaner actually stimulate them to hatch… Lots of rental units stay infested this way.

   It’s good to keep your cat on monthly flea control as a precaution because once you get them they are hard to get rid of. It’s easier to prevent them than get rid if an infestation. Hope this helps.

2. 

   Christina Chambreau

   Indoor cats can get fleas. Often, though, people think that because a cat is itching that they have fleas. There are two ways to discover if your cat has fleas – one is to see the fleas themselves, often on the thinner hair of the belly. The other is to look for the black gritty debris that seems like coffee grounds, often on the back just up from the tail or behind the ears on the neck. To be sure it is not dirt, put the debris on a damp white cloth – if it turns red it is definitely flea stool. They suck blood, so their stools are black and the blood will show red when it gets wet. 

   There are multiple ways to eliminate fleas – holistic or conventional. Both require that you treat the environment (house, for an indoor cat) and the cat. The kindle book, Fleas Be Gone: A holistic veterinarian’s guide to natural flea control, will give you lots of great steps to remove fleas, some at almost no cost – 1. Buy a good flea comb and comb twice a day until 2 weeks after seeing no fleas and 2. build a light trap to attract the fleas to soapy water where they will die and 3. vacuum a lot – 1-2 times a day and discard the bag or keep diatomaceous earth in the bag so the fleas will not lay eggs or crawl back out. 

   The fleas can hitch a ride into the house on you or your clothing, though this does not often happen.