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Flea Control
Did you know that the fleas that you see on your pet account for about 5% of the problem! That is why you need a Flea Control Program, rather than just a product to kill the fleas on your pet. Let's review the flea life cycle. Once a flea jumps onto your pet and takes its first blood meal, the flea's metabolism changes and it must continue to feed frequently to survive. (Prior to its first meal, a flea can live for many days searching for food). Now that the flea has food, it wants to stay on your pet - it does not want to jump on and off unless it is disturbed. Undisturbed, a flea can live for about 100 days. During that time, a female flea will lay hundreds and hundreds of eggs. These eggs are white and slippery. They will immediately fall into the environment (carpet and furniture). Unless these eggs fall onto a shiny surface, you will probably never see them. What most people think are flea eggs are actually flea droppings! The droppings look like small black dots or perhaps comma shaped spots that stick to the fur and the skin. If they get wet they will look reddish brown, since they are comprised of digested blood from your pet! Any time that we see these spots on a pet, we know that the pet has a flea problem, whether we actually find the fleas or not. In your carpet and on your furniture, these eggs hatch into tiny crawling larva. These larva eat garbage, especially flea droppings! After a while, they will spin a cocoon, which can survive for a long time and cannot be killed by any products on the market. Eventually, these cocoons will hatch out a new adult flea and within seconds can jump onto your pet and be feeding again! Because of this long life cycle (about 3-4 weeks), and because three out of the four stages of the flea's life cycle exist off of your pet, you should not be concerned with a fast killing flea product - instead, you want efficiency. If one flea survives and is capable of producing viable eggs, then your flea control program has failed. PRODUCTS - We use (and sell) only 5 flea products:
These are the ONLY flea products that we recommend. There are specific reasons why other products are not recommended by us - most of these products lack efficacy or are more toxic. Please feel free to discuss any questions with our staff. |