Are fleas necessary? The flea control companies say no, but do they mean it?
Aug 27 '01
The Bottom Line Capstar, Advantage, and what's going on here anyway?
When we start thinking about choosing a flea control product, our thoughts (mine at least) immediately turn to the question, “Are fleas necessary?”
Is there some reason that we haven’t simply eradicated them from the planet? After thinking long and hard on the subject, and doing a lot of research, I found that there are only four reasons to have fleas. Armadillos, Hedgehogs, Fleas are in favor of their own existence, and to make money for people who make products that get rid of fleas.
Fleas we understand. They want to live. Who doesn’t? Fair enough. Armadillos and Hedgehogs, I am led to understand, by very reliable sources, need fleas to live. As bizarre as it might sound, they require the stimulation to their skin that is provided by having fleas. Which brings us to the companies that make the products that (if you are reading this review) you are interested in buying.
I’m always skeptical of any company where, should that company actually attain its goals, it would go out of business. Let’s face it, pest control companies don’t want to get rid of pests. Then they’d have no jobs.
As I thought about these things, and decided to go over these products, it occurred to me, how hard would it really be to get rid of fleas?
Now, I should mention that I originally wanted to review Capstar, the somewhat new flea control pill. Of course, it’s not available to review. Capstar is a pill that somehow kills all the fleas on your animal, in my case cats. I found it to be an excellent, if bewildering product. It’s a tiny pill for cats, thus rendering it a pill that is actually possible to get down a cat’s throat. The claim on the packaging is that it will kill all the fleas on your cat in 4 hours or less. I found this to be more like 5 hours, but still, it’s pretty amazing.
It is a bit of a strange thing to watch this working on your cats though. It would seem that this product does not provide a quick and painless death for the fleas. They seem to put up quite some bit of struggle, as witnessed by the fact that your cats will freak out for a while and scratch worse than ever for about an hour. At the end though, the fleas are definitely all dead.
I have to admit, that watching your cats adopt new, bewildered facial expressions, and dive into their own skin after the fleas (which are apparently being tortured somehow) is sort of a good gag. In the wrong hands I foresee large parties of drunk people purposely exposing their cats to fleas.
On attempting to purchase this, I was led to understand that this is a prescription pet medicine. This was, by the way, a new concept for me. I’m not sure of the underlying idea behind prescription pet medicine really. Strung out pets on street corners? Or, are they afraid that if I get too much at once I will give my cat twenty of these pills at a shot so that, in my drunken fit of laughter, I can try to see if the fleas will actually shoot across the room rather than just fall off?
Well, however that sort of thing works, the internet is apparently a sort of pet med black market, because at online stores I could get whatever I wanted. Except, heartworm medicine. You still needed to fax them a prescription for that. Some good stuff in that apparently.
But, the Capstar got me back to my original thinking. Are they really trying to get rid of fleas? If Capstar can turn my cats into walking flea death machines, and they say that you can give this to your pet once a day if you want without any ill effects, why can’t they just put some of this in all pet food and make my cats permanent flea death machines?
Now, the Capstar only kills the fleas. It doesn’t prevent fleas or protect from fleas, or anything of that nature. So, unless you want to give your cat a pill everyday, you have to use something else as well.
So, what do you use to prevent fleas? Well, there are many choices. I have tried just about every flea collar on the market and have found that flea collars are to repelling fleas as well-endowed, scantily clad women are to repelling construction workers. I haven’t seen any of them do anything to prevent fleas, and I am quite convinced that some of them have flea food in them.
Our next option are the strange group of products that are small tubes of about one ounce of liquid which you put on your cat’s back. This soaks in, and quite honestly who knows what it does from there, some sort of radiation I expect.
Whatever it does, be very wary of any of these products you find in the store. I have also tried several of these and have not seen results. Hartz products, most especially, seem to me quite useless. I have tried Advantage products, and they seem to work quite well, but they are also in the unavailable at the pet store, prescription required category.
There are also sprays, dips, and bath products you can use. The sprays are generally extremely annoying to your cat, and don’t work well enough to be worth the effort. The baths and dips are great, but they generally don’t ‘keep on killing’ nearly as long they claim. If you just want to kill the fleas, I have found that just about every bath/dip I have tried has done the job, but you’ve got the Capstar for that, and you don't have to give a cat a bath.
You have another option as well. You’ve probably seen these all over, and wondered. The little sonic gizmos you plug into a socket that supposedly make some sort of ultrasonic noise that drive all the bugs away. Do they really work? They sure do. In my experience anyway. The problem is, and I’ve tried three, they aren’t as ultrasonic as you might think. That is, I can hear them. Now, I can’t always hear them, but the good ones cycle through a range of high frequencies, and some of them aren’t all that high.
They do work though (at least, it seems to me that they do), so I recommend getting one. Don’t mess about with any cheap ones though. I recommend buying one from somewhere that will let you plug one in first to see if you can hear any of the frequencies the thing will sound off with. You have to, as silly as this sounds, 'listen' to it for about five minutes, because they usually cycle three or four frequencies for 30-45 seconds each.
But then, it again occurs to me (now let’s assume they perfected these so that all the noise is really out of human range), are they really trying to help with these sonic doodads? If they were, how hard, once again, would it be to just get rid of all pests? If no one can hear (theoretically) the stupid thing anyway, why not crank the volume on that bad boy and clear out the whole neighborhood? It can’t cost that much in electricity, I’d be willing to pay for the whole neighborhood. Why don't they? Because they want my neighbor to buy one too. In fact, why not just increase the sales tax by .01 percent (or some other scheme) and have the local government installing these all over town?
The final thought is that you have to combine any of these measures with some sort of spray for the home, because otherwise they come back. Unfortunately, you have to really soak the whole house for it to do any good.
So, what’s the overall summation? Get some Capstar, some Advantage, and something to spray (or better yet bomb) the house with. Stay away from just about anything you can buy in a pet or grocery store (apart from dip/bath products). And, don’t trust them.
If you don't have fleas (and your cats don't either), and you only are looking to prevent, Advantage has worked the best for me. It's not cheap, but it's not too bad, and it works. The $5.00 stuff at the pet store isn't really a deal because it does nothing. Also, you really only have to use Advantage (I have found) in the summer, depending of course on where you live.
You may want to use it once in maybe late March, once around the end of October, once a month in summer.
As the curious tidbit of information. Did you know that when a cat purrs it doesn’t mean they are happy? The experts have agreed (by and large that is, I mean maybe some of them don’t. Who knows? That fifth dentist is still holding out, so you never can tell) that when a cat purrs it means something that can be best described as being receptive to attention. They would not mind if you wanted to pet or play with them, but happiness, per se, doesn’t enter into it.
Case in point, and pardon the weirdness here. If you stab a cat and leave it alone there bleeding, it will purr like mad (so I’ve heard), but you wouldn’t want to say it was happy.
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Member: Marc Eastman
Location: Bangor,ME
Reviews written: 328
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About Me:
Evangeline Sylvan Betty Eastman. AKA "Cricket" 9/12/06
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