Flea Prevention and Treatment
Fleas and other parasites migrate towards the unhealthiest individuals. So in a family of dogs and cats, usually the oldest or most ill animals will attract the most fleas and “flea dirt.” Flea dirt shows as black specks that are often located towards the base of the tail, and they consist of the animal’s digested blood the fleas have defecated on the animal. You can distinguish flea dirt (sounds better than flea poop) from other dirt by soaking a white paper towel and rubbing the dirt you find on the animal into the towel. If it’s flea dirt, there will be a red-tinged color to the moistened dirt.
The best preventive measure is to clean and vacuum the home and launder all beds and linens. Even hardwood floors can harbor fleas, since they reproduce well in the tiny cracks. Also, buy a flea comb. A metal one with very close bristles works best rather than plastic to catch fleas and dirt. If you comb regularly, you will know if there is a problem before it becomes a crisis.
Fleas reproduce very quickly! Each female flea can lay up to 100 eggs. In three weeks, female offspring can lay eggs and so on. Fleas are also becoming resistant to spot-on treatments (e.g., Advantage or Frontline) but they can never be resistant to desiccation products. This is because the drying properties of Fleago, Borax, Fleabusters, etc., kill the flea, not through hepatotoxic and neurotoxic chemicals like the spot-on products, but rather through drying the exoskeleton of the insect at all life cycles.
Since fleas go to the unhealthiest animals, why not take measures to ensure your pet is in tip-top health? Supplements containing B-vitamins, vitamin C and other antioxidants are often in dismal proportions in commercial pet foods. Just adding simple nutritional yeast (as long as your pet is not allergic to yeast products) will give him or her B-vitamins quite easily. A cat can get 1 tsp. of nutritional yeast mixed into the food daily and a large dog could thrive on 1 tbsp. (or try Dr. Donna's Vitamin Powder recipe). You can also add other antioxidants and even homemade cooked or raw food with omega acid support. There is nothing fleas hate more than homemade foods! Since many of our patients are prescribed a specific homemade diet to help treat chronic disease, we rarely see fleas in our practice.
Be careful with the newer oral treatments for fleas, for example Comfortis. This flea product is really wreaking havoc in the animals treated with it. If you have a real infestation and cannot get it under control holistically, use an older spot-on instead. Although it is not without side-effects, we recommend Advantage just once in August in our area if fleas are really a problem. We can tell when the diet is not up to snuff by the level of parasitism in our patients.
Using essential oil products such as cedar oil, rosemary oil may be somewhat helpful but we do not recommend applying any essential oil to a cat, as a few have died from tea tree oil applications. Cats lick off the oils and ingest dangerous levels. In general, I think of treating and preventing fleas from the inside out and by treating the environment. This is because fleas only spend 5% of their time on the pets. Most time is spent in the environment—around your house and even in the yard. I find that dog’s diets are better overall than cats, so the cats often bring the fleas in and spread it to the dogs.
A note on garlic: Garlic and onions even in the powder form are toxic to pets, especially cats. However, a little can be helpful. We do prescribe garlic in very tiny amounts to specific patients without anemia or liver problems. But the dose is a fraction of what many people give (e.g., a sliver no bigger than the end of a toothpick three times a week for a small dog). This is usually if there is a specific cardiovascular disease or infection we are treating. In general, we do not recommend garlic for flea prevention since there are safer ways to prevent fleas.
