Kitten with fleas?help!

Question

help! my 3 and a half month old kitten has fleas. how do we get rid of them without hurting her? we gave her two baths already and they didn't work. she is too young for medications like frontline and advatage. we have two older ats in the house one is 16 the other is 2. we don't want the fleas to spread to them if possible. any ideas?

Answer 1

give her a bath in DAWN dish soap...don't know why, but it kills fleas...we did this for our cat when he was a kitten and it worked.  make sure that you also wash sheets etc... & use a flea powder for carpet cleaning as they will be there also

Answer 2

Get a flea comb from a good pet store.  You comb her fur and catch the fleas.  Dump them into a dish of soapy water and they will drown.  Do this a couple times a day until you have caught all the fleas.  Then watch out for the ones that will hatch in a couple of weeks.

Answer 3

My vet administered a full dose of Advantage on my cat when he was only a month and a half old. It's more to do with weight than age. It's best to stop the fleas on the kitten now than get rid of them on all three later. Advantage is available for cats between 1 and 9 pounds, and it's in an orange box, and there's a kind for cats over 8 wks and over 9 pounds.

In case no one else tells you, don't bother buying anything from a drugstore or walmart to treat fleas. Those topical meds don't do anything but possibly hurt cats. Do the Dawn bath, and you can also get flea powder to sprinkle on carpets and vacuum up. I left it overnight because my cat was still spending the night in the bathroom. Good luck.

Answer 4

Okay, hon, listen up good. Fleas are insidious and almost impossible to get rid of. Giving baths isn't going to help. All the stuff you buy at the store isn't going to help either. Fleas are VERY hard to get rid of.

But I've done it,  and I REALLY REALLY know what I'm talking about. I know more about fleas than any sane person ought to, so follow my advice...

First, take the kitten to a vet and get her a bath specifically designed for killing fleas.

Take your other cats for the same treatment, also. You may think that your other cats are safe right now, but you are WRONG. If fleas are in the house, you've got to worry about every single one of your cats!

Once they're clean and have no fleas, DON'T bring them back home yet. Board them up or let a friend or family member who has a flea-free home look after them for you temporarily.

Now, the stuff you buy at PETCO or Wal-Mart and all those other stores to get rid of fleas in your house WILL NOT WORK!!!

A good flea killer has two properties...

1. It has a poison that kills the adult fleas

2. It has what is called an "Insect Growth Regulator", which is a juvenile insect hormone that prevents the formation of chitin. What this does is breaks the breeding cycle. It prevents eggs from hatching to larvae. It prevents larvae from forming the tooth they require to break out of the cocoon after they finish the pupae stage, so they can't emerge and cause harm as adult fleas. It also prevents them from breeding. Fleas need to feed before they can breed.

So what you really need is this stuff called "Ecto-kyl"; that's the best stuff out there. You can get it as foggers. Get one fogger for every large room in your house (don't forget living room and kitchen).

Here's how you need to do this...

1. Get flea baths for the cats as I described.

2. Get cats temporarily in a safe, flea-free place as I described.

3. Get the Ecto-kyl foggers (buy them from a vet; they're pretty cheap).

4. Follow the instructions on the Ecto-kyl.

5. Wait two weeks, then vacuum the ENTIRE house, and immediately use another bunch of Ecto-kyl foggers.

6. After the 2nd fogging, you should be safe to bring all the cats back to the home.

The reason you are waiting two weeks is because some of the fleas in your home will be in a pupae stage, which is the life stage between larvae and adult. During this pupae stage, the flea is tightly wrapped inside of a cocoon that it made. The cocoon protects the flea from EVERYTHING. Not even water can get inside! Flea pupae stage cocoons are like one of the most protective things in the whole world! The fleas there will be totally safe from any kind of fogger poison.

The first time you use the Ecto-kyl foggers, you will be killing the adult fleas in the home and also be taking out the eggs and larvae.

Unfortunately, ALL of the fleas in the pupae stage will be safe inside of their cocoons. What you need to do is wait for them to finish up the pupae stage and come out of the cocoons on their own as adult fleas and then kill them with the second fogging job.

The way to do that is to wait two weeks so the cocooned fleas can grow up to adult stage. Then you vacuum the entire house like I said. The reason you vacuum is because fleas are strongly attracted to vibrations. The vibrations on the floor caused by the vacuum cleaner running around the whole house (vacuum tile and hardwood floor, also, not just carpet; you're just trying to make vibrations to coax the fleas out of their cocoons) will make the fleas come out of their safe cocoons. After you finish with the vacuum, you can set off your second set of foggers to kill them off.

After that you should be the winner of the war.

EDIT: The Dawn bath thing really isn't going to do the trick. Neither will the vacuum powders that you sprinkle on the carpet (in fact, that will just give you more fleas because you coax them out of cocoons with the vacuum vibrations).

Answer 5

Get  it  treat  @  the  vet.