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16396
Truman Road, Ellisville MO |
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Pet Tips
Text - Flea Prevention
View the video here.
Hi I'm Linda from Manchester West Veterinary Hospital.
I just wanted to go over a topic called
Fleas.
A lot of our clients have flea problems and you
see it in the latter part of the summer months. August through
October is usually the time that we see more fleas than any time of the
year. The reason for that is fleas like a high
humidity environment as well as the temperature
rising being hot in the summer time, and so those months you are going to see
more fleas because of the multiplication of the
fleas turning worm to spreading from the adult,
to the eggs, to the larva and to the adult fleas
again so they multiply more during those
high humidity times.
We want to talk to you about why you might have fleas on your
pet. A lot of people do not realize that fleas
are usually in your yard from other animals going through
your property, or relative's dogs coming to your
house to visit and they may have fleas on them
as well.
You can bring fleas into your house on your
clothes, on your shoes and on your pants.
Your pet can also bring fleas into the house.
They drop the flea egg in on their body as
they're walking and
they drop the flea eggs from their body as they
are walking, just as salt falls from a salt
Shaker, therefore the flea eggs are in the
environment and they will go ahead and change
from one stage to the next.
Flea eggs can start hatching from
one to six days. After that they go into a larva
stage which looks somewhat like a maggot and
that can stay in the stage for up to 3 weeks and
then we go ahead and change into the pupa stage
which lasts about 2 weeks and then the adult
stage.
People want to know how long the pets stays in
the adult stage and usually that can go up to 62
days and then they will die out. So it is very
important that they keep on multiplying and
reproducing to keep the flea population going.
A lot of dogs do have flea allergies as well as
cats. We will see a pet come in scratching a lot
and the reason for that is they are having an
allergic reaction to the flea saliva when they
bite the pet for a blood meal and therefore they
have an allergic reaction which causes them to
itch. Some dogs itch extremely a lot which
causes a lot of thinning of the dogs back area
by the hips and they will lose all that fur from
their scratching or from their chewing and
pulling the fur out. We can help treat them
medically to help solve that problem by treating
for the fleas as well as treating the dog and
making them feel more comfortable and make that
hair regrow.
The other things that we see are we have some
pet that do not scratch or bite at all, and they
just do not have an allergic reaction to
the saliva of the flea so that is a situation
where we have to physically look at the pet to
see if we find any flea dirt. Flea dirt is just black
little specks that are on the dog and basically
that is from the flea taking the blood meal and
passing it through its system and when it comes
out they do also pass the eggs with the flea
dirt . And therefore if you want to make sure that is
flea dirt you take a white paper towel add the
flea dirt to the paper towel those little black
specks a little water will turn them a rusty
color and that will tell you for sure if you pet
has fleas.
The other thing we want you to be aware of is that these
fleas also carry a parasite called tapeworm.
Tapeworms are in their little bodies so that
when a dog or cat will be chewing on their fur
because they are itching so bad they can ingest
these fleas the flea itself will die and a
tapeworm will emerge and then you have another
parisite
problem in the intestines called tapeworms.
We do have several products that we do use in the clinic to treat for these
flea problems. We will go
over those the next time I talk to you.
I appreciate you being with me this afternoon,
and everyone at Manchester West would love to
talk to you in person or have you come by, or
just call us on the phone. We would
love to talk to you at that time.
Have a great day!
Back to Pet Tips
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Serving the cities of Chesterfield, Ellisville,
Wildwood, Ballwin, Eureka, St. Albans, Manchester, West
County and
the greater St. Louis area since 1993.
Copyright 2012 © Manchester West
Veterinary Hospital. All rights reserved |
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