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A number of options are open to pet-owners when it comes to controlling flea problems on their dogs and cats. Fleas are an unwelcome visitor by anyone’s standards. They not only cause your pets to itch and be miserable, they also infest your house and furniture if you’re not careful. Once they are established within your house, they not only come for your pets, but for you, too. Consequently preventative measures are the best solution to the problem and help nip it in the bud before it even begins. A number of options are available including flea combs, pills, biospot, flea shampoos, dips, flea collars, and sprays.
Flea combs are an interesting option. By combing your pet you remove the fleas (supposedly) from their hair. Unfortunately, you don’t get all and those that you do remove are simply in your house or on your lawn, in which case they are free to again infest your pet. Pills are a new idea. Apparently they cause your dog/cat to secrete a small amount of toxin through their pores or their hair folicles, causing fleas to die upon contact. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work, for what reason I don’t know. Biospot makes your dogs smell sweet for a couple of days and it works for about a week, then you can forget about it.
If you find that your dog has become infested with fleas, there’s always the option of bathing them and using special flea shampoos. These are toxic to fleas but are safe on your pets. However, like a number of other options, they aren’t preventative. You kill the dog’s fleas and a week or so later you simply have to kill the fleas that are currently infesting your dog. This is very time-consuming and probably not altogether pleasing to your pet.
Alternately, you can have your dogs dipped when they get fleas. The vet will do it for a small fee and it usually works for about a month. Short of prevention, this is one of the best ways to treat fleas. Of course, you probably still have fleas in your house which will simply rehabitate on your dog/cat. To prevent this, you may want to use flea collars. These work great at killing the fleas in the upper portion of your dog’s body, but unfortunately they don’t make collars designed to fit around a dog’s rear- and mid-sections, limiting the effectiveness of flea collars. They are cheap, however, so it’s never a bad call to use one and hope that it at least reduces the number of fleas on your pet.
Dogs seem to hate sprays the worst—apparently they irritate the skin. They also work fabulously, usually keeping fleas off for a couple of months. In application, use gloves and ruffle the dog’s fur, spraying affected areas. As said, dogs hate this and it does stink, but it works wonders. The ultimate measure in prevention is spraying your yard and/or house. This is time-consuming and can be dangerous to your pets if they get into it, but it kills fleas. If there are no fleas in your house or yard, there will be none on your pet. This can be fairly expensive depending on the size of the application area and reapplication every month or two can be very tedious. It does work though, so if you want effectiveness, you can bet on this. Just be sure you don’t get your pets around other people’s flea-ridden pets. Then the whole process starts over again.
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