flea meds necessary?

Is it really necessary to use flea control if my kitties don't ever go outside? Even tho my doggies have both passed away I plan on treating the lawn outside for the very reason of keeping away fleas and ticks from the house. Won't this be good enough?

I'm not really sure, but I have been told that fleas can be carried in on your clothes and shoes. My cats are strickly indoor cats too, but no matter how hard I try to prevent the fleas we always get them. Here is a link to my recent question about flea meds and how you can save quite a bit of money too!

I just ordered my pets flea med's from http://www.pets-megastore.com.au/ and I followed the suggestions from Hissy. I got Advantage for $33 plus shipping...and this will last my crew (4 animals) for 6 months!! Usually it would cost $33 for each animal!! What a huge savings! Definitely check it out!

Thanks Shell! I'll definitely check it out!

You are welcome..but a big thanks should go to Hissy for the great tip!

My cats don't go outside at all, and I've only had fleas once, they came in on a puppy we adopted, and all the cats got them. We ended up returning the puppy, and got a different dog. We treated the new dog with Frontline Plus Spray, that was about 2 years ago, and we haven't had fleas since. I don't treat any of the animals for fleas now.

I would treat the lawn, and if you still notice fleas on the cats, then treat them. I have heard also that you can bring flea eggs and such into your house from your shoes and clothes, but after two years and living in two different places, we have never had that happen. I think it is always better for cats to be exposed to as few chemicals as possible

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. My siamese that I had years ago lived for 19 years and during that time they only had fleas twice and I think the biggest reason for that was because I had dogs at the time. I'm going to just treat the lawn and not worry about it. I just hate to put chemicals on the little things if it's not necessary.

Hi ddestes

I don't even think you need to treat the lawn. We were an indoor only cat family for 9 years (before we adopted an indoor/outdoor) and never needed to treat the lawn or our cat. I simply combed our cat and kept my eye out for fleas.

In the 9 years, she only had one hijacked flea (that we must have brought in) which I caught early and never had a chance to lay eggs or infest the whole house. At the time we lived in a duplex and our downstairs neighbor had a dog and cat with fleas. All the subsequent years, we lived in a larger place with grass everywhere. . .never had fleas. . . .never treated the lawn.

Now that we have an indoor/outdoor cat, we treat both of them, spring through fall with Advantage. If you do get fleas, don't worry about the Advantage. I read a vet who said that the only bad thing that will happen to your cat if it licks off some Advantage is that there is less stuff to kill the fleas If your kitties do get fleas, you'd probably only need to treat them one time anyway.

Treating a whole lawn will also probably kill all your friendly bugs and earthworms (my favorites) and may not be necessary. Why not give it a try this year and see how it goes? Just an idea.

I've only had a flea problem once in 11 years, and that was when I only had one cat, Midnight. I had been living in a ground-floor apartment with a sliding door, and thought it was so cute that Midnight would get nose to nose with the stray cats outside through the screen. It was cute until fleas jumped off of the strays and onto Midnight, and from there got in the rug....That happened 10 years ago, and the lessons I learned then have kept me from having that repeat itself.