Flea Treatment Diary Part 1: Flea Free in 2015

I’m not a great one for making (or sticking to) New Year’s Resolutions but I’m going to try very hard to make 2015 an exception because there is one resolution that I am simply determined to keep: To apply flea treatment to Stanley and Cookie every single month.

Important date in the calendar

According to vet Charles Cullen of Deepdale Veterinary Centre in Bedfordshire, a cat who has been treated with an effective flea treatment like Frontline Spot On is “a flea killer”. Any of the bloodthirsty critters that attach themselves to passing cats (or dogs) who’ve been treated with the stuff will be killed within 24 hours before they’ve had a chance to lay any eggs. And if no fleas lay eggs on your cat, there’s no risk of an infestation starting in your home.

However, you have to treat every five weeks in order for your cat to retain this level of protection. My co-cat butler and I learnt this the hard way last summer. It was a busy time of year, we went on holiday, had builders in, did lots of DIY, attended weddings and barbecues at the weekends, etc. and before we knew it, two months instead of one had passed between flea treatments and Cookie was spotted scratching her ear a little more vigorously than usual.

Sadly, the security blanket had to be washed

After several months of obsessive washing, vacuuming, steam cleaning and spraying the house – not to mention the number of times I had to wrest poor Stanley’s security blanket out of his paws and bundle it into the washing machine, while he folornly watched it spin round – I think we finally got rid of the problem. But with the thermostat still turned up against the cold, now is the perfect time for any surviving flea pupae to hatch… And I want them dead before they can start the cycle again.

The heating goes up, the fleas come out…

So how am I going to keep this resolution when applying flea treatment feels like such a chore and there are so many other things that demand my attention? Well, for starters I’ve signed up to Frontline Spot On’s text messaging reminder service and I’ve adorned the new wall calendar with treatment reminder stickers on the appropriate days. These methods should help, but if I receive a text when I’m out there’s a danger I might forget about it by the time I’ve got home, plus the calendar also contains my relatives’ birthdays, which I still usually manage to miss, so I might need to try something else too.

As it happens, Cookie and Stanley’s last dose coincided with the arrival of the January edition of Cat World magazine, for which I have a monthly subscription. So, if all else fails, fingers crossed, when the February issue hits the doormat, I’ll know it’s time for the next treatment.

Cat World arrives

For extra motivation, I’m going to record my success at keeping this resolution over the next couple of months in this blog. Wish me luck!

Do you have any good ideas for helping you remember to treat your pet for fleas and ticks every month?

Cookie versus the treat maze

This little cat is going to have to use all her ingenuity and amazing paw eye coordination to get those tasty treats out of that treat maze…

…er no, actually she’s going to take advantage of her extremely small head and cheat her way to her treats!

Fighting talk

Stanley and a Frank have a disagreement

It’s a dilemma that almost all kitty parents face sooner or later: whether or not to intervene when your cat is in a fight. Lately, Stanley has been keeping us awake at night by having heated discussions with one or two of the neighbours’ cats (usually Frank) on the fence right beneath our bedroom window. I worry that if I call out, I’ll distract him and give his opponent an opening to attack. Plus, there’s the danger it might embarrass him terribly. So I hold my breath and watch. And I’ve come to recognise a pattern:

The interloper will invariably make a low pitched growly noise while Stanley will produce a shrill, high-pitched wail. The opponent will keep still as a statue except for a slight twitch of his puny tail and backward motion of his ears. Stanners will beat his huge, magnificent tail on the fence, wall, ground or shed roof like a caveman beating a club, before casually flopping himself down. Finally, the challenger will inch away, avoiding exposing his retreating back to a bored looking Stan puss before making a last minute dash for safety.

So, as noisy and nerve wracking as these episodes are, I try to tell myself that I shouldn’t worry because it seems like, round here at least, the cat who always wins the fight is the one with the highest voice and the biggest tail. And that’s our Stanley Snaggletooth.

No contest: Massive tail vs puny tail

A cat’s dinner

Fine feline dining

Chef: “Bonsoir Monsieur, a table for one?”

Cat approaches food bowls and sniffs suspiciously

Chef: “Perhaps Monsieur would like to try the tasting menu this evening? We have a delectable salmon mousse, an organic chicken liver terrine, followed by tender morsels of rabbit in a delicious sauce, polished off with mixed seafood luxury crunchy bites in charming shapes and washed down with spring water with essence of tuna.”

Cat makes obscene gesture with paw over the food, miming covering up his own excrement with soil

Chef: “What’s that you say Monsieur: ‘Do I seriously expect you to eat this s**t?'”

Cat swaggers over to catflap, meows something over his shoulder and dives out, leaving it swinging like a saloon bar door

Chef: “Ahh, you’d rather have take away tonight then?”

Moments later cat returns, dragging a piece of naan bread dipped in chicken vindaloo through the catflap and begins devouring it in a damp corner

Chef sighs, grabs spoon and considers terrine for a split second, before tearing off apron and slumping onto the sofa.

Adventures in cat selfies

I’m always astounded by the huge volume of amazing cat videos on YouTube. If I so much as think about reaching for my phone or camera then Stanley and Cookie abruptly stop doing whatever crazy antics they were up to and refuse to perform. One episode I really wish I’d caught on camera is the time I stepped outside the back door to whistle Stanley in for his supper and when he came bounding over the garden wall towards me, Cookie ran out to greet him and they had a full head on collision.

Taking still pictures is a bit easier but it’s still tricky to capture the perfect moment, for example, when Stanley is stretched out in the upside down super puss pose with one snaggletooth showing or when Little Coo’s tongue is poking right out. As a consequence, my photo album is filled with cat pics, most of which are out of focus.

Another thing I’d particularly like a photo or some footage of is the Stan Hug. This is something I’m subjected to at least once almost every morning or night. The classic version involves an Incubus style embrace with the front paws tucked tightly round my neck, the claws hooked through my hair and the head jammed under my chin.

The Stan Hug has four variations: the Classic Stan Hug, as mentioned above, the Side Stan Hug, in which Stanley does an impression of a pirate’s parrot, the Reverse Stan Hug, which involves me lying on my front, and the Vertical Reverse Stan Hug – the only Stan Hug to occur after 10am and essentially a piggyback.

Maybe one day I’ll take a lesson from this woman whose cat jumps onto her head while she’s brushing her teeth each evening and set up a camera to capture the moment secretly. But then I’m worried that would be the day that the Stan Hugs cease altogether, and although they can be stifling and always result in a mouth and nose full of cat fur, they are rather wonderful.

But I digress. If taking funny cat photos is a challenging affair, then snapping a cat selfie is an almost impossible feat. To get them to hold a pose not just long enough for me to snap them but to dive in the frame too is simply asking to much. So, I was a little daunted as well as excited when I heard about Frontline’s summer #LoveYourPet campaign to find the UK’s most dedicated pet owner. To enter,  you have to like their new Facebook page , upload a pet selfie with a description of why you should win and share with friends and family. The prize is a year’s supply of Frontline to protect your pet from fleas and ticks and a fabulous pet friendly holiday!

I’ve been trying to get them excited but for some strange reason they are not sharing my enthusiasm and are deliberately sabotaging my attempts at cat selfies. After a week of chasing them about the house with my phone and waking them from naps with a camera flash in the face, here’s a sample of my best efforts:

Cookie & me

This one could go on a folk album cover

Great of Stanley, terrible of me

Great of Cookie, awful of me

Hanging out on the shed roof

Chilling out on the sofa

But maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if we didn’t win. While a year’s supply of Frontline would undoubtably be great, I’m not too sure about the pet holiday. Cookie and Stanley have spent Christmas and Easter at their grandparents’ house, and while they enjoyed having a bigger house to explore and the luxury of a gas fire to curl up beside, they did not travel well. Clearing out a stinking, soiled cat carrier in the backseat of a car with all the doors and windows closed and then persuading an anxious cat back into it at a motorway service station is not an experience anyone would want to repeat.

So, I think I’ll put my search for the perfect cat selfie on hold for now and wish everyone who enters the best of luck!

Cookie keeps fit

I’ve mentioned before that Cookie takes snoozing very seriously. In fact, you could say that, like Charles Dudley Warner’s cat Calvin, she ‘knows the secret of repose’. She has even had points deducted, rather unfairly, from a feline IQ test for waking from a nap, stretching and going back to sleep.

But this is not to say that she neglects to stay in shape. Oh no, she has at least two workouts each day, usually between her post-breakfast and mid-morning naps and between her evening 40-winks and bedtime. These short, sharp bursts of activity follow the current trend for high intensity, interval training and tend to coincide with my own workouts. So, while I did my circuit this morning, her circuit went something like this:

Warm up by sharpening claws on workout mat, peppering floor with pieces of blue rubber until strangely jumping human gets cross and picks up and throws a softball under sofa

Do comedy running on the spot while claws attempt to get traction on laminated wooden floor before suddenly being propelled forwards

Dive under sofa after softball

Come out from under other side of sofa dribbling softball

Chase ball through closing gap between strangely horizontal human and mat, lose ball, turn back to retrieve ball with paw at last moment Indiana Jones style

Slalom through table legs and legs of strangely squatting human while maintaining expert control of ball

Chase ball down steps into kitchen

Stop to check for breakfast leftovers as ball goes past food bowls and hoover them up

Hurtle back into living room

Jump up onto TV unit and move head in rhythm with figures on screen

Suddenly get freaked out by scary American shouty woman and dive under sofa

Emerge from under sofa dribbling a ping pong ball

Chase ball over mat

Fall over onto side and begin frantically trying to disembowel mat while bits of blue rubber fly in all directions

Spring up into air to header ping pong ball retrieved and thrown by human shouting to leave mat alone

Dribble ball past scratching post, dig claws into post and swing round in circles, landing on back, looking upwards

Become transfixed by the scary patch on the ceiling

Get spooked, sit with ears back, tail twitching and then thudder upstairs

Jump onto chest of other human in bed, making him say ‘Ooofff!’

One cushion, so many ways

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The Direpuss

The Direpuss – sigil of House Rixon – a terrifying beast, twice the size of a normal cat.

He is not afraid of anything, not even the straylings or orange walkers beyond the Wall.

He will look into his pond anytime he wants, even if a passing ginger cat happens to be looking in it while the direpuss is sunbathing on the roof and isn’t even thinking about looking in the pond – that is not the point – he might have wanted to look in it and he will look in it without some fat ginger cat spoiling the view with his fat ginger reflection.

The direpuss will not allow bluebottles to mock him. He will hunt them down, pacing back and forth inside the house all day if that’s what it takes, until the bluebottle weakens and is reduced to crawling along the windowsill. This is when the direpuss will strike and scarf it down.

The direpuss will not eat his food inside his dish no matter how big it is or if he is given a side dish, napkin and finger bowl; he will drag his food out of the dish and eat it on the floor, or even better, the rug. He will spray morsels of food from his mouth in all directions when he eats so that they harden into the lumps known as gribbly bits. His humans will tread in these gribbly bits and walk them into the rug so that it becomes embedded with cat food whether or not the direpuss chooses to make gribbly bits on it in the first place.

The direpuss will roll in snails and sticky grass, soak himself to the skin in the rain and grow strange lumps and dingleberries in his fur. If a brush is inserted into his fur in an attempt to remove these lumps, the brush will become snagged and the direpuss will run away with the brush still attached so that perhaps, in time, his fur will grow over the brush and turn it too into a dingleberry. Have that, brush.

He is a direpuss and he will do as he pleases, but he should not forget his house words: ‘Children are coming to visit and they are going to want to play with you, Stanley puss’.

Stanley puss?

A new toy and an old toy

Cookie has a new toy called Lady Rat. She loves her very much.

Lady Rat is very pretty and has a tail and ears and everything.

But I’m a bit worried that Pinky may be jealous…

Hmmm, perhaps I’ve seen Toy Story too many times.

That’s better.

Wildlife watching on the big screen

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