Primarily from going outside. If you have an exclusively indoor kitty, can they get fleas and ticks? Absolutely, because we can be a source. We can go outside, do some gardening, or go for a hike, so we can bring parasites into the house ourselves. A cat's a suitable target for them as well. Interesting. Fleas prefer dogs first, cats second, and people last. So, all things considered, if you happen to bring any fleas into the house, they'll probably hop off you in search of a cat or a dog. And if you don't have dogs, your cat will probably be the target for your fleas, so that's going to be a potential issue.

It depends on the time of year and what part of the country you live in. Welcome to North Carolina. We do see fleas and ticks for a significant part of the year. In fact, ticks are potentially a year-round problem in North Carolina. Even if it gets extremely cold, we can still see ticks. Over the last 40 years of practice, I have seen a lot of tick problems that begin in February, right in the dead of winter. They'll typically continue throughout the year. For fleas in this part of the country, we typically don't get fleas outside during the months of late December, January, and February. Sometime in March, maybe early April, the fleas will start to emerge outside. We do have that small window where we typically don't have flea issues or the potential of pets picking up fleas when they go outside in the months of January, February, and March. But otherwise, they are a big problem in this part of the country.

Good question, because we get this asked a lot. A lot of people have the perception that, well, my cat never goes outside. He can't get fleas. He can't get ticks. It's very unlikely that he would get a tick, but we can actually bring fleas into the house. If you have other pets like a dog, they can bring fleas into the house. We always have to have this expectation that if you have indoor-outdoor pets, they could be a source of bringing in fleas, even to an indoor kitty.

The main diseases we see in cats with fleas come from tapeworms. They get the tapeworms from ingesting the fleas. That's the only way they can get it. The only other way is by eating a small mammal. But the bigger problem we would see with cats is due to cats having a grooming ritual. They will swallow a flea when they start grooming themselves and consequently will most likely get to tapeworms from those fleas. We do see issues with ticks, not to the degree that we typically see in dogs, but we can see some health concerns with ticks in cats as well.

Let's talk about the origins of some of the problems. Let's talk about flea allergies because that is such a common problem in cats. These are the cats who are ripping their hair out. They've got sores in the front and the back of their neck all the way to their tail and sometimes on their belly. Get them on an appropriate flea product. Food allergies are easy to manage too. First, we have to see the cat to get a better sense of where a cat is ripping his hair out on the body. Not exclusively, but typically if I see a cat coming in that's ripping the hair out around its face, the temples, the neck, and around the ears, I'm always going to think of food allergies.

We'd have that discussion about what foods are most likely to cause allergies in cats. Quite simply, that would be beef, fish, and dairy. Those are the big three. We'd look at the diet. We'd obviously want to change to a different diet. Usually, it's an ingredient issue and not a brand issue. If we're dealing with a ringworm situation, we will discuss how to address or treat ringworm and be on the lookout for ringworm showing up on us or other pets. If we're dealing with cancer, we'd have to address and see what type of cancer it is. That's going to indicate how we can address it long-term.