How to Treat Newborn Kittens With Fleas

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Dr. Marcia Martin and we're here at Safe Harbor Animal Rescue in Jupiter, Florida to talk about pet health care. This segment we're going to talk about fleas. I think fleas are everybody's worse nightmare and treating fleas in kittens can be tricky. Under 8 weeks you need to stay away from chemical flea products. You need to focus more on mechanical removal of the fleas either by bathing with a mild shampoo, it doesn't have to be a chemical flea shampoo. Any shampoo will do. Just lather up, let the lather sit for like 5 minutes, rinse them well and then follow up with a good flea comb. Comb the fleas out. Once you've got some fleas on your comb just dip your comb in a bowl of water that contains some Dawn dishwashing liquid and that'll help kill your fleas that are on the comb so you're not just putting them back on the kitten. But mechanical flea removal for kittens under 8 weeks is pretty much the way to go. Over 8 weeks and you can go to your veterinarian and you can get one of the veterinary approved top on flea products. There are several brands on the market, they're all very good and most of them have a pretty good margin of safety. You want to stay away from some of those over the counter product that contain pyrethrin and permethrin. These are insecticides and they have a very slight margin of safety and have been known to actually cause injury to domestic animals. Also remembering that only about 10% of your fleas are actually on your cats, the rest of them are in your house. So focus on the animal's bedding, your carpets and your yard with flea products, there's numbers of them out there, but focus on your environment and don't rely so much on putting chemicals directly onto your pets. So that's a little bit about flea care on cats and I hope it was informative."