Our cats Dave, Steve and Molly have recently suffered a flea infestation, poor little beasts. They’ve been itching and scratching like mad but on the bright side, I’ve made some really interesting money-saving discoveries while treating them.
Frontline fail!
I’ve always stuck with Frontline spot-on stuff before, simply through habit, but with all three cats flea-ridden, it’s an expensive option at £25 for 6 treatments (the cheapest I could find online). Especially when it doesn’t work!
I’m not sure whether fleas are becoming immune to Frontline but I tried two treatments each and the cats just kept on scratching. Plus, a sure sign they were over-run, there were flea eggs everywhere.Yuk, gross.
Perhaps it’s because getting the drug on their skin, not on their fur, is tricky, and it takes some effort to get it in exactly the right places: on the back of the neck and between the shoulder blades. Especially when, like ours, your cats are particularly wriggly and unwilling.
Spend £8.75 instead of £25
The long and short of it, we spent almost £50 on two lots of Frontline to no effect. So I went to our local pet shop and bought some simple flea tablets by Johnson’s.
Their 4 Fleas Tablets cost £8.75 for six treatments, two for each cat. Whatever’s in them starts killing fleas within 15 minutes of the cats taking them – we could actually see the nasty little buggers dying and dropping off. And it kills the lot within 24 hours.
There are virtually no side effects. And you can hide the tablets in cat treats so they don’t even notice. I hid them inside sections of Webbox cat treats, which have a hollow centre, and the cats just scoffed them down. Brilliant.
I love the fact that it works so much better than Frontline and costs a third of the price. 24 hours later all three cats are flea-free, with no eggs dropping off them onto their beds and no more scratching. And we only used 3 of the 6 pills in the pack, so the actual cost so far is £4.37 in total compared to £50 so far on Frontline.
That’s more like it!
PS. As an extra bit of information to add to last Friday’s post, we also got one large, hot bath and one load of washing out of our water tank that evening despite only having the hot water switched on for a couple of hours that morning. How cool is that!