What Flea Control for cats products are effective in 2024?

March 14, 2024 9:52 AM

Seems like fleas keep adapting to flea control products and ones that used to work aren't doing the job. What flea products have worked for y'all this year. I have an indoor 20lb chonk that needs relief. We're in Texas.
posted by a humble nudibranch to Pets & Animals (8 answers total)

Revolution Plus has worked just fine on my two nerds in Austin (indoor but with access to a catio). I have to assume you're using the prescription stuff as well?
posted by mykescipark at 10:18 AM on March 14, 2024 [1 favorite]

Have you tried Cheristin? That worked for us after the others stopped working. (I'm in Los Angeles.)
posted by BlahLaLa at 10:21 AM on March 14, 2024 [2 favorites]

I would ask your local vet since different fleas can develop different resistances - when I lived in Louisiana a couple years ago, I was told to use Cheristin, but occasionally mixing it out with Revolution or Frontline to avoid resistance.
posted by coffeecat at 10:24 AM on March 14, 2024 [3 favorites]

Best practice for any kind of chemical pest control is to rotate through three or four active ingredients with different modes of action, if you can find them. So for fleas, you probably want to run a cycle of fipronil or fluralaner -> imidacloprid -> pyrethroids -> spinetoram if you can. It's a lot harder for a population to develop a resistance to a substance if surviving treatment round N doesn't select for an advantage against treatment round N+1.

Fleas don't spread anywhere near as fast as human-carried microbes, so your own hyper-local flea population's resistances probably have more to do with the specific garnishes you've been spicing up their main meals with to this point than the kind of across-the-board fizzling out seen with e.g. antibiotics, especially if you've been consistently using a single product for some years. If you check the active ingredient on whatever you've been using and avoid that specific active or its related compounds (check Wikipedia for modes-of-action information) for the next few treatment rounds, you'll probably be able to knock it down to much more tolerable proportions relatively quickly.
posted by flabdablet at 11:14 AM on March 14, 2024 [2 favorites]

None of the topical treatments worked for us the past few years (on either dogs or cats) but we had good luck with Seresto collars. Our vet recommended them.
posted by belladonna at 4:00 PM on March 14, 2024 [2 favorites]

Seconding Seresto collars (just make sure you get authentic Seresto collars and not knock offs). I took in two abandoned cats who are used to being indoor/outdoor and we could NOT get rid of fleas no matter what we tried, until we went with Seresto. For the first time in YEARS, we were flea free.

We've been using these collars for three years now, and no side effects and NO FLEAS.
posted by annieb at 5:28 PM on March 14, 2024

Seresto has two active ingredients: flumethrin (a pyrethroid) and imidacloprid (a neonicotinoid). So I'd expect it to work well against fleas resistant to either of these classes of chemical alone (or to neither), but if you use it consistently for more than a few years then I would expect to see your local flea population acquire an annoying degree of resistance to both.

Failing to rotate your poisons gives their targets a consistent threat for evolution to amplify resistance to, generation on generation. It's much better to keep switching things up.
posted by flabdablet at 2:37 AM on March 15, 2024

In our old house, we had to switch from Revolution to Seresto (we did the topical, rather than the collars) because the fleas were completely immune to Revolution. I echo others saying it's probably hyper local and switching often is probably the best answer.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:09 AM on March 15, 2024