Can you share flea control between pets

Using flea control on your pet is important, but sometimes those flea products seem so expensive. With that in mind, it can be tempting to buy a flea control product between your pets. Buying a box of flea control product to share between 2 pets of the same species who are the same weight is fine. This won't cause any problems. But buying a product meant for a big pet and splitting it between a few little ones is potentially dangerous. While this seems like a good idea, in reality it has the potential to cause more problems than it is worth.

The biggest issue with sharing flea control between pets is the chance of an overdose. While flea control products are safe to use at the doses prescribed, if you calculate the wrong dose or accidentally give too much, then your pet may be at risk of overdose. Overdoses can cause symptoms such as tremors, vomiting, diarrhoea and seizures, and could potentially be fatal for your pet.

This is especially true if you were to try giving dog flea control products to a cat. Cats have a much lower ability to metabolise some products (such as permethrin) than dogs do. A dose of permethrin that is safe for a dog is very likely to cause severe tremoring and seizures in a cat.

The other main issue with sharing flea control products between pets is the variability of dose they receive. If you are using a top spot product, it can be difficult to estimate properly how much is in each pipette, and one pet might receive too much, and the other might not receive enough. This could lead to ineffective flea control and more expense as you will need to buy more product.

While it is tempting, it simply isn't worth the risk to share flea control products between pets. Flea product overdoses are not only expensive to treat, but they are also potentially fatal and very distressing for the pet. Do yourself and your pets a favour and buy each pet their own corrrect dose of flea control product.