Starting Flea Prevention Again

Posted on August 18, 2011 by Patrick Shearer, BVMS, PhD

After a few years in Oregon, my wife and I have just moved to Davis, CA. What’s in Davis, you ask? Well, apart from the University, fleas. Lots and lots of fleas. While we were living in Oregon, we’d become a bit casual about parasite prevention; fleas aren’t usually a big problem there and heartworm prevalence is fairly low compared to other states. We still treated them, but not as frequently as we should have. The problem was that we developed bad habits so as soon as conditions changed, our pets were prime targets.

We’ve got 2 cats, Jake and Sophie, both domestic shorthair and 2 dogs – Andie, a maltese cross and Jackson, a kelpie cross. Even though the cats are indoors, the dogs bring them inside from the garden. Once they’re inside, they stay in the carpet and bedding, so we had to make sure we started treatment straight away.

We were fortunate not to run into problems in Oregon; fleas survive very well indoors during the cooler months, whenever we travel we take our pets with us and when people come to visit they often bring their pets, too. It wouldn’t have taken much for them to become infested.

Now that we’re here in California, we’ve started a regular parasite prevention routine again. It wasn’t hard starting again and to make sure we don’t forget we’ve added a reminder each month into our calendars, computers and phones. I say “parasite prevention” and not just “flea prevention”. Fleas are the most obvious parasite on our pets, but many intestinal parasites are zoonotic (can be transmitted from our pets to us) and heartworm disease can be fatal. Most heartworm products are also effective against intestinal parasites, so by treating monthly with a flea preventive and a heartworm/intestinal worm preventive (or a combination product) our pets are protected and we don’t have to worry.



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