Is Your Pet Spending A Lot of Time Scratching?

Spring has sprung! Although the mild winter was wonderful, (unless you just bought a snowplow), and the early spring has been beautiful, this weather pattern is going to mean a very bad year for fleas and ticks.

After many years of being able to control them fairly easily with the pest control products like Frontline and Advantix, be prepared for a battle this season. The mild weather never completely killed off last year’s crop.

You need about five days in a row of sub-freezing weather to get rid of the little buggers, no pun intended. On top of that, the bugs have an amazing ability to mutate so that a chemical that killed them one year is not as effective the next.

Last year we started to see this happening. Pets who were on a monthly routine of very good flea products were coming in to my grooming salon still having a flea problem. I started to recommend that my customers rotate their flea products, i.e., Frontline for a couple of months, then switch to Advantix for a couple. This way the bugs had less of a chance to build up a resistance to any one product. I am sure the pharmaceutical companies are rushing to find a new product line, but until the next miracle product comes out, we will need to be vigilant.

When treating a flea problem, it is imperative to be thorough. Fleas only spend one stage of their life cycle on the pet - the feeding cycle. They lay their eggs and spend the rest of their life off the pet, living in your carpet, under the bed, in your couch cushions, between your hardwood floor boards, in the car seats and anywhere else they can tuck themselves in.

The best way to avoid a problem is to keep them from ever getting started by watching your pets constantly, flea combing and checking for any sign of them. Flea feces looks like grains of pepper, black and gritty. While you may not see the actual critters speeding around under all that hair, their feces is evident if you are looking for it. If you are not sure if it is just dirt or flea dirt, take some of the granules and put them on a wet paper towel and rub them around. If you get reddish brown streaks on the towel, it is flea dirt, actually, digested blood.

As soon as any indication of fleas is noticed, treat the pet, vacuum everything (house and car if they have been in it) and get the dirty vacuum bag outside to the trash. Spray or fog the house if it looks like they have gotten a good start. Remove all pets while spraying or fogging.

This is a good time to have them professionally groomed. However, remember that your pet can spread his fleas to the other customers, so be considerate and treat him with Frontline, Advantix or Capstar before taking him where other pets are. When fogging, the spray comes straight up out of the can, fills an area and falls to the ground. Use one fogger per area. The fog does not fill a room. Condense to go through a doorway, fill up another room or go down a hallway. It fills one OPEN area. It does not reach under the bed or couch cushions or in a closet, etc. These areas must be sprayed with an aerosol flea spray before setting off the foggers. If you only spray one area, it just chases the fleas to another area.

With diligence, both you and your pets can be flea-free this year.

Robbye Hemminger is owner of  and Boxwood Bed and Biscuit Inn.