Back to: FLEAS! What Happens When You Ignore Sound Advice

We were talking about something... fleas! Right! I'm on it.

Close-up of the fanged maw of a common flea, which
looks something like a Photoshopped humpback anglefish

So, armed with fear and ignorance, Scruffles and Bear went to a veterinarian's clinic that for legal reasons cannot be named. We walked to the pet nurse at the desk and informed her of our problem.

"We have big cats, they all have fleas, and my life has no meaning," I said.

The nurse looked at me for a moment, then at my wife, who calmly explained the issue. "So," Scruffles finished, "what can we do about our cats?"

"Shoot them," said the nurse.

"Wow, thanks!" I started for the door. "Let's go, Scruffles! We have work to... Scruffles?"

My wife was still talking to the nurse, who, to my horror, had only been kidding. I listened to the conversation that followed and got the general idea that we had to buy a lot of poison, cover our cats with it, then spread poison all over the house and leave on vacation. Three weeks later, we would return and there would be no more cats fleas. That sounded good to me.

Then... then... I learned the poison would not hurt the cats, just the fleas. Not hurt the CATS? REALLY? That sucked whale butt. We bought the first poison application anyway and, after two hours of screaming and bleeding on our part, we got a gloppy splurt of flea gunk on the necks of all of the cats and locked them in different rooms. We covered our arms and faces with antibiotic gunk and waited an hour or two for the glop to go to work killing trillions of worthless evil disease-carrying barf-inducing fleas from the pits of heck.

This done, we later bought a big plastic jug of anthrax mixed with botulism and Ebola viruses from a military surplus store and sprinkled it all over the house. This did not kill the cats, or even give them a heat rash. I vacuumed up all the poison, coughed a lot, and that's where we are now, waiting to see if we will be forced to burn down the house next weekend.

Stay tuned. Or not. Whatever.