Not all guests who come to the cats only boarding facility are indoor cats. Some are allowed to roam the “big blue room” once in a while; some spend the majority of their time outdoors and only show up for meals and bedtime.
Not that fleas are solely a problem of outdoor cats — far from it. Fleas can get into your house (and onto your pets) even if your furry family never sets a paw outside the door.
One thing we don’t want at the boarding facility is for a guest to catch a case of critters while they are under our care. We work very hard to maintain a flea free environment.
When a guest arrives, they are carefully checked before they enter the main boarding room. This includes a weigh-in and a look at eyes, ears, and nose — and then we check them for fleas. We have a special comb that catches hair, dandruff, and any critters that might be present. The comb is extra-fine toothed, so it can even pick up what’s called “flea dirt” — the waste fleas leave behind. Get it wet and those little black or brown specks turn red or rust-colored. (That’s the blood in the flea poop, in case you were wondering.)
If we don’t find fleas or flea dirt, there’s no problem. The guest can go right into their condo in the main boarding room.
If we do find fleas or flea dirt, we get the owner’s permission to treat the cat with Advantage. Then the cat goes into an isolation ward for a few days to let the Advantage go to work. We’ll check the cat daily (with the fine-toothed comb) to see if there is still evidence of fleas. Once they’re clear two checks in a row, we can move them into the main boarding room!
A pair of guests came in over the weekend and one had some serious flea action. As I applied the Advantage, I actually saw the little bugs scurrying away from the liquid! I could imagine their little voices as they fled: “Abandon ship! Abandon ship!” Two days later, the fleas are all gone.