It's time to talk ugly - about fleas.  It's starting to warm up, pets are spending time outside, and the fleas are gearing up to party.

In southern Nevada, we rarely see fleas.  That doesn't mean they aren't there.  But with humidity around 5% most of the time, these little buggers simply dry up and die in the environment. But many of you are not so lucky, and to you, I have empathy.  When I was growing up, we tried flea collars, but for the most part, the nasty bugs lived in our carpets and yard, which was watered a lot. Seemed impossible to get rid of them.  I remember watching them jump onto my bare legs, then I'd run into the bathroom to wash them off in the tub.

Nasty, yes.  What's worse, they carry some pretty disgusting stuff.  My two favorite are tapeworms and bubonic plague. 

Tapeworms: white flatworms that live in the intestine, hooked on by mouth suckers that steal nutrients from the digesta. The worm regularly sheds little segments of its ever growing "tail" that contain eggs - eggs of tapeworms. If you've seen the little maggot like monsters creeping around on your pet's behind, you know what I'm talking about. Those are sections that have broken away, hoping they will fall off your pet and get to live in a nice moist carpet or grass where they will meet up with an errant flea. 

The flea, often flea larvae, we will say, will eat what it can find until it morphs into the nasty jumping insect we all hate and it becomes a vampire. The egg manages to find its way into the flea, where it develops into a mini time bomb.  What has this got to do with anything?  It is the flea that your pet ingests when she is biting the spot where the flea is siphoning blood.  You've seen dogs and cat do this, I know.  A flea gets stuck between the teeth, swallowed, and yippee, the tapeworm is now inside the host (your pet).

Sounds incredible, but that's the way it is. To kill tapeworms you must kill fleas, primarily by disrupting their life cycle. You can give your pet a de-wormer of Droncit, but if you don't get rid of the fleas, you can bet your last dollar (in Las Vegas, please) that tapeworms will return.

Responsible for killing perhaps a quarter of Europe's population many centuries ago, Bubonic Plague, the Black Death, was blamed on rats, which were running rampant because cats were thought to belong to witches and rat terriers we not yet invented. Fleas that lived on the rats happily carried their plague wherever the rats went, and if the rat was too overpopulated, the fleas jumped off and found people to bite instead. 

The bacterium Yersinia (aka Pasteurella) pestis would cause disgusting boils which usually overtook the host and killed it, and thereby releasing itself from the body and getting onto the next person.  Bodies should have been burned, along with their clothes, but given they still believed cats were witches' familiars, they didn't think fleas were involved, just the rats (hence the love of cats returned). 

So back to ridding ourselves of fleas.  The cheapest and easiest item you can use is diatomacious earth (DE) the powdery grey stuff which is eensy weency crystals that cut and dehydrate the flea in its environment (namely, your carpet).  You can get this stuff everywhere, and its cheap cheap cheap. Plant nurseries, swimming pool supply shops, your local big box department store retailer - use it liberally by sprinkling in your carpet near doors and sleeping areas.  At the same time, wash your pet with an insecticidal shampoo.  Use caution with this by putting some ointment in the eyes and cotton in the ears so this won't get in your pets' mucous membranes.  Start at the head of the pet, at the nose, and make the fleas run away towards the tail, not into the nose.  Leave a ring of suds around the pet's neck and rinse the head and dry.  Now you can do the rest of the body.

If you want to make sure, use a topical (on the skin) oil that you can get from your veterinarian like Advantage, Frontline, or Program (Program is Droncit, the tape worm killer, by the way). These can be used if your pet ventures outside to keep new fleas from coming back via your pet taxi.  After 3 weeks, vacuum your carpet and apply the DE a second time.  You can leave it there, or vacuum it after 3 weeks.  This should take care of fleas that hatched since the first treatment.

While you're at it, check for ticks - small round nasties that also carry a multitude of disease from Lyme to Spotted Fever. 


My spell checker had a lot of fun with this post.