(Just so you know, the picture is not related to the story at all, I just wanted to post a cute pic of my little familia. They were beating eggs for a German dessert we made Sunday called erdbeerkuchen(sp), basically is was similar to shortcake. Piper was hitting Charly with the spoon and Nate is telling her to be gentle.)OK so its a tad more than three fleas, or a lot more! We are having major issues with fleas, I blame the neighbor dogs. I came downstairs at the wee hour of 6:30 this morning and while I was sitting on the couch I had four fleas jump on me. Yesterday Piper had two in her hair! You cant kill them with a hard squeeze either, they just jump our from your fingers. Its really gross.
I have always associated fleas with dirty houses and that is not the case here. I am vacuuming like crazy, emptying the canister right after, washing everything and still nothing. That is why I called Nate and work today to tell him we had to spray today. We bought a bag of diatamacious earth and Nate is going to make a spray solution out of it that we can spray on the floors. This is going to have to help because we don't want to spray toxic chemicals in the house. Shelby has had a bath with flea shampoo and we got her a flea collar but cut it off of her after finding out they are extremely toxic to humans and dogs. I feel like it will be impossible to get rid of with Shelby going in and out all the time. Ugh I just picked another one off of me.
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Serving as a veterinary technician for over two years, I heard the spiel on fleas over and over. Here's the breakdown on the important parts supplemented by reference:
1) Adult fleas are fairly easy to kill using physical means (try capturing them with tape and then getting them between your fingernails) or chemical means. The flea bath and DE examples you gave are great examples.
2) Adult fleas are only a small portion of the total flea population in your house.
3)You need to understand the flea lifecycle in order to effectively fight them.
Take a look at the "Life Cycle and Habitat" section on wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flea
There you will learn that:
1) Your dog is constantly distributing flea eggs throughout every area of your house where he travels
2) Your fleas progress through a pupal stage in which they are locked up in a silken cocoon and in which they can choose to remain for an extended period of time if necessary (my old Doc used to say it was up to 6 months) They can then come out of that pupal stage within a matter of seconds at the first signs of motion as an adult flea and hop aboard for a snack. During the pupal stage, they are impervious to almost any chemical or other means.
What this all means is that any effective flea program needs to incorporate some means to break the flea life-cycle on an ongoing basis. At any given moment, you have fleas in all stages of the lifecycle and even if you kill all adults today, they will be back tomorrow as the new crop hatches. People who are willing to use the most powerful chemicals even have difficulty fighting fleas, so you are at somewhat of a disadvantage and will need to be extremely diligent to lick them.
Here are a few bits of advice:
1) Empty the vacuum bag immediately after vacuuming or else you are wasting your time
2) Simply cranking up your AC (this may be the most expensive idea here) will do two things to restrict fleas - it lowers humidity (which flea eggs need to hatch) and it brings the temperature down to a level that is not as optimal for their living conditions.
3) If you can get yourself to stomach this thought, there really are some marvelous products out there. One of which is the chemical that you place on the dog once per month. It absorbs into the dogs skin and then kills all the fleas that get on the animal for the rest of the month. This effectively denies the fleas of their meals and knocks out the adult lifecycle stage. It could be a good compromise to avoid spreading chemical throughout the house, but which would effectively stop the flea problem. As the wiki cited above mentions, these chemicals essentially "turn your dog into a roving flea trap."
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