There are 3000 kinds of fleas, including a dog’s flea, but the most widespread is a cat’s flea, which lives on the dogs with a great pleasure. So how to rid out of fleas on the dogs?
How do the fleas appear on the dogs?
The fleas don’t live on the dogs. All warm blooded creatures, including people, dogs and cats play the part of a moving restaurant for the fleas. An adult flea jumps on the dog for eating. It clings to the hair, bites through the skin and sucks the blood with the help of the short moustaches similar to the needles round the mouth. Several fleas can have a desire to bite at one and the same time.
To check the presence of fleas you should put your dog on the sheet of paper and to comb it with your fingers. Then you should collect the dirt with a cottonwool tampon: fleas’ traces, while dissolving, form the stains of dried up blood.
Being on a dog, they copulate, and females postpone hundreds of eggs. 8 hours later the postponed eggs fall from the hair. From each egg hatches a flea larva, which grows the whole next week. Having reached 5 mm, the larva turns to a cocoon in which there are all necessary organs — brains, nervous system, digestive organs, — and remains in such condition, until a new body is formed. The adult flea can live about 8 months, waiting a dog or a cat, on which it is possible for it to move for eating. When it feels a vibration, the flea jumps. A life cycle from egg to egg lasts about 2 years.
How dangerous the fleas for a dog are.
The infection with fleas is especially dangerously for those dogs which are sensitive to the stings. In certain cases fleas also become a source of infection with worms.
The dogs are in the risk group.
All the dogs run the danger of risk. The animal can catch fleas from other dogs, cats and other animals, for example from hedgehogs or rabbits or direct from the environment, where the above-listed animals live.
A flea’s life cycle.
In this or that kind fleas spend their life mostly living on the earth and jumping on warm-blooded animals (for example, dogs) for eating and breeding.
How to act.
- Check up your dog on fleas on dogs symptoms regularly. To do this you should put your dog on the sheet of paper and to comb it with your fingers. The parts of dirt will fall on the paper.
- Make a cottonwool tampon wet with water and erase the dirt from the paper, then wait for some minutes. Look at the tampon carefully: all the dry traces of fleas’ life activity will start to dissolve and some brown stain will appear around them. It would be traces of the sucked blood.
- Having defined the signs of fleas on the dog, it is necessary to start struggling against them immediately. Process a dog and the house with the insecticide and make a plan of the further actions.
- If a dog has a strong reaction to the fleabites, it will need an emergency medical aid as it can scratch itself till bleeding because of the strong itch.
- The symptoms of infection with fleas are very similar to the signs of other diseases of a skin, therefore medical examination will be rather careful. The veterinarian will do the test for checking the presence of the fleas, which is described above, and if a dog has an allergy to stings, he will make the skin tests in addition and then he will appoint a corresponding treatment.
- It is possible that you may have to treat other skin diseases, such as pyodermatosis, which a dog got because of the scratching.
Fleas on dogs home remedies. You should:
- Regularly clean that spot, where your dog sleeps, with the vacuum cleaner and, its carpet and cage, and all the house and round it as well (if you put in a garbage bag of the vacuum cleaner an antiflea powder all fleas, who have got there, be lost).
- Regularly spray the house with a spray from adult fleas. There are also some means which stop the development of flea eggs, but you should use them only 3 times a year.
- Regularly to process a dog’s hair with highly effective antifleas means.
WARNING. The fleas on dogs home remedies represent the poisonous chemicals. Use them very carefully, according to the instruction.
It is dangerous to use two antifleas remedies at the same time, if the doctor didn’t advise it to you.
Mostly in all the houses, where pets live, there are fleas. Having sucked the blood, the insects jump from the dog and wait for another victim including people. In case you are sensitive to the fleas, you ought to process your house with antifleas remedies constantly.