I suppose you have to chalk it up to luck, but I have had dogs all my life and only had the mildest flea problem once in all those years.
This summer, I had the fleas that ate Chicago on my dogs. Mean fleas. Determined fleas. Circus fleas. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t comfortable and it wasn’t easy to deal with. In fact I am still dealing with it now. My beautiful dogs have bare legs and bumpy chests. My two cats are chasing their tails. Mars managed to chew his feet to pieces in thirty minutes. Astra’s butt fluff, her only bit of modesty in a tailless world, is gone. Every few hours they started scratching and couldn’t stop. Mars started doing a flea hop walk with one stride forward and one leg up to scratch under his arm. Ahhhhrgh!
I have learned my lesson. And I have some advice to share as a result.
When your dogs start scratching, don’t chalk it up to environmental allergies, even though they are worse than ever in the summer with the heat, humidity and the pollen. If I had it to do over I would have gotten my dog bathed at My Pet Naturally Clean when he first started to scratch and ask the groomer to look for fleas or done it myself. If you find them, make sure they are all off before you take your dog or cat out of the tub. A commercial dryer will in fact blow the fleas to kingdom come. But they might not be dead. Better to take them off one at a time and kill them between your nails.
Be proactive if you want to stay natural. If your pet is itching, you need to get to the cause quickly. Vacuum your apartment, do the laundry, all the laundry, including the towels and the bedding. Use a non-toxic spray on your dogs and your furnishings. Over and over again. Put down some diatomaceous earth and leave it there for a few hours before vacuuming it up. Diatomaceous earth is a food grade powder. Many people eat it to get rid of internal parasites. It is just the right shape to pierce the exoskeleton of the flea and kill it with natural dehydration. Don’t forget to treat areas under furniture. Treat your car. This is war.
Any itchy spot your pet develops needs to be treated with a topical anti-itch, anti bacterial spray to keep it from getting worse. Scratching compulsively can give your dog a yeast infection. Keys’ Metacare healing lotion is a phenomenal product. Everyone at My Pet Naturally uses it on themselves and their pets. Natural sprays with neem or cedar should definitely be employed and often. It’s the odor that drives off the fleas. If you can’t smell it, neither can they. This might cause your dog to act like a jumping bean rolling downhill, but that’s life with fleas. You will be tempted to put a tee shirt on your dog to stop the itching. Please consider the temperature first. Vacuum bags need to be primed with Paraclear (our brand of diatomaceous earth) and tossed out; bagless brands need to be cleaned. Look everywhere for fleas. What you don’t know will hurt you… and your pets. Dogs and cats may need a bath weekly for a few weeks. You will find that the pet who hated water is suddenly less interested in fighting you. That’s because it’s one of the few things that seems to quiet the stingy itchy monster. Make sure if you bathe more often (you are stripping away natural oils that keep the coat healthy) that you use a moisturizing conditioner; the one we like at My Pet Naturally is Azmira’s Organic Conditioner. Consider a Shoo Tag, a magnetic tag that hangs from your pet’s collar and repels fleas.
Here’s the really bad news. You maybe have to do this three times before you’ve got the fleas bitten. I mean beaten. And even then if you let the fleas get out of hand, you might have to do a chemical bomb and then de-chemical your house like crazy. Because there is no question that fleas do tremendous damage to the quality of a pet’s life. And if you have a flea crisis, you might have little choice but to turn to chemicals, which is something we all try to avoid
Once the fleas are gone, you can’t really rest. You can only start over. And the name of the game is flea prevention. Which is everything you just did to get rid of them, on a regular basis. Now I have to go vacuum. Sigh.
My Pet Naturally carries the following products for Flea Control
Products that kill fleas
Paraclear by Azmira, diatomaceous Earth Dehydrates fleas.
Ingested products that change a pet’s odor to make it less attractive to fleas
Garlic powder
MSM powder
Raw food is also said to be less of an allure than kibble.
My Pet Naturally also carries repellants:
Nature’s Inventory Wellness Oil Flea and Tick repellant w/peppermint, jojoba, eucalyptus, rosemary and citronella.
Organic Neem Dip by Azmira
Organic Neem Spray by Azmira
Management products at My Pet Naturally:
A variety of shampoos and neep dip from companies like Azmira, Organic Oscar, Envirogroom and others.
Procollar soft Elizabethan collars to keep a pet from scratching
Shoo Tag magnetic repellant tag
Products that soothe: We have many of these at My Pet Naturally and also at My Pet Naturally… Clean
Keys Reddi Care products Neem and Karanja oil are the best product we’ve found for soothing itchy dogs and healing skin breakouts.
Yucca intensive is a natural anti inflammatory. Newton Flea and Bug Bite is a homeopathic.
Astra and Mars and my apartment and car are defleaed. I am still dealing with ragged skin and the itchy aftermath of the attack of the fleas and I know now to make flea prevention part of my life.











