Summary: Fleas and other parasites are common in cats and young kittens. Learn how to test your cat for internal parasites and use flea prevention with tips from a veterinarian in this free pet care video.
Dr. Gregory McDonald earned his Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree from Ohio State University in 1979. Since then he has continued his education in areas such as laser surgery,...read more
"Now we're going to go ahead and talk about some parasites and parasite control in Kim's cat. One of the things that I want to do is to send home a little fecal container with you so that you can bring that back, drop it off sometime between right now and our next visit. And what we do is we send that off to the lab and the lab will actually check it for internal parasites. Cats especially get a lot of internal parasites from their mother, through the placenta and through the milk and so kittens at this age are frequently infested with some type of internal parasite. And so just looking at the fecal sample at the lab, they do some very specific testing looking under the microscope and some what they call fecal flotation and an antigen test to try to find out if there is anything in the stool. So we are going to encourage you to bring that back right away. And we're going to talk a little bit about fleas. Now what are you using for your other cat for flea control? Advantage. Ok, (multi action) very good. We're going to actually talk about Advantage Multi because Advantage multi covers a lot of different parasites for your cat and it's going to be really, really helpful to do that with this kitty cat, because I think that this particular part of the country, Santa Barbara has a lot of problems with parasites because it's such a nice area for them to live. Even indoor cats a lot of people don't realize that they can get fleas on their inside cats because they bring a flea in with them or a neighbor's cat comes in like you mentioned. And then the fleas jump off and bite your cat and start a whole new family inside of your house. So this has been a really good product for us and we like Advantage Multi because it does so many different things. It takes care of a lot of different paratisisim of your cat. It's going to take care of fleas, heart worm, round worms, hook worms and it even takes care of ear mites. And so I didn't see any ear mites in your cat but again with your cat's history of where it's lived and also it's unknown history, they frequently do come down with ear mites and even though I don't see one today they could be a problem. So we're going to encourage you to take some of this home today and start your cat on this. Now have you ever put this on a kitten before? No not a kitten. Ok. One of the things that people make a mistake when they are putting this on is they put it on the fur instead of parting the fur and put it down on the skin. Very, very important that you actually put this on the skin. Now I don't think it really hurts the cat but we have a few cats that don't like it. And so it might take two of you some friend or something to hold the cat while you part the fur and they put the stuff on. I think that it is, it's very nice because it's once a month. You don't have to do it all the time. And also it takes care of all of these different parasites, so you really don't have to worry about any other parasite control. This is an example of the Advantage Multi we were talking about. This is for adult cats but I just wanted you to go ahead and look at the box here because we are going to send the same kind of box home with you that's for kittens."
eHow Article: Cat Parasite Testing & Flea Control