Care Guides

For two years I applied my cat's flea treatment wrong and had no idea. The pipette went on, the fleas came back, and I blamed the product.

What I was actually doing was squeezing it onto fur. Not skin. Fur.

Spot-on treatments work by spreading through the oils in the skin, and if the liquid sits on the coat it evaporates, or the cat licks it, or it ends up on your sofa. The instruction says part the hair and apply directly to the skin, and I had read that instruction perhaps forty times without doing it, because parting the hair on a cat who does not want her hair parted is genuinely fiddly and I was in a hurry every single time.

Here is what finally worked, worked out over a few years of failing at it.

Do it when she is sleepy. Not after play, not when she is hunting the hallway, not the moment you get home. The half hour after a meal when she has gone soft on the sofa is the window. I do it in that window every time now and the whole thing takes fifteen seconds.

Get the pipette open before you touch the cat. All of it. Snap the top, hold it upright, have it in your right hand ready. The number of times I got a cat settled and then spent twenty seconds fighting a plastic seal, at which point she left, is embarrassing.

Then the placement. Base of the skull, between the shoulder blades, and higher than you think. The point is somewhere she physically cannot reach with her tongue, and cats are more flexible than we credit. If you put it too far down the back she will get to it, taste something bitter, foam at the mouth, and you will spend an hour convinced you have poisoned her. That foaming is usually just the taste and it passes, but it is unpleasant for everyone.

Parting the fur without a wrestling match

Two fingers of the left hand, pressed down on either side of the spot, then draw them apart. The skin shows. You do not need to see much, a centimetre is plenty. Hold that gap and empty the pipette straight onto the skin in one go, then let go and do not rub it in. Rubbing gets it on your fingers, which is both wasteful and something to wash off afterwards.

Long-haired cats need a comb. I keep a fine steel comb next to the treatment box and make a parting with the teeth of it, which is far easier than fingers in a dense coat. On my Persian friend's cat this is the difference between the dose reaching skin and the dose reaching nothing at all.

A few things I learned the harder way.

Do not bathe for at least two days either side. The oils in the skin are the delivery system and shampoo strips them. I washed a cat the day after treating her once, having forgotten entirely, and effectively threw the dose away.

Check the weight band on the box. Cat products are dosed by weight and the difference between a 4kg band and an 8kg band is real. Guessing is how people underdose a big cat and then decide the product does not work.

Never, under any circumstances, use a dog product on a cat. Some dog spot-ons contain permethrin, which is severely toxic to cats and kills them. This happens every year, usually with good intentions and a half-used dog pipette. If a cat gets dog treatment on her, that is an emergency phone call, not a wait-and-see.

In a multi-cat house, separate them after treating. Cats groom each other, and the one who did not get treated will happily lick the wet patch off the one who did. I keep mine in different rooms for a couple of hours until it has dried. Doing all of them the same evening also saves you from the fleas simply moving house.

Mark the date somewhere you will actually see it. Mine goes on the kitchen calendar with a single letter, because the reason most flea programmes fail is not the product, it is the fifth week when nobody remembered. Fleas breed on a cycle and a gap of a fortnight lets the eggs in your carpet catch up with you.

Which brings up the part nobody wants to hear. Treating the cat is maybe half the job. The eggs and larvae are in the rug, the bed, the gap under the skirting board, and if you have an active infestation, the cat treatment alone will not clear it. Hoover thoroughly and often, wash the bedding hot, and use a household spray in the worst rooms if it has got away from you. My worst summer took six weeks to properly end and I had been convinced the vet's product was rubbish, when actually my house was the problem.

Tablets exist too, and for a cat who genuinely cannot tolerate spot-ons, or a swimmer, or a long-haired nightmare, they are worth asking about. My vet was clear that the best product is the one that actually gets administered on schedule, which I thought was a kind way of saying she had met me.

Two years of blaming the packaging. The fix was a comb and a fifteen-second window after dinner.