Horseback Field Trials: Re: Flea Control

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Re: Flea Control - The Deal

Posted by Doug Meyer on 8/3/2012, 4:50 pm, in reply to "Flea Control - Or Lack Of It"
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Most of the response here are OK but having lived in Tampa, FL back in the mid seventies where fleas ARE A REAL PROBLEM, let me give you some hard learned insight. There were people in our subdivision that ended up with fleas in their houses and they had no pets at all. That is a flea infestation my friends.

Here are some facts as I know them. The fleas spend 80% of their life off of the host and just sitting in the dirt, sand and other hiding places. A vibration on the ground wakes them up and they spring to life to jump on whatever is passing by - that may be you also. If you take an animal out of a flea infested house and then YOU walk back in in a couple weeks later wearing a pair of white trousers, it will look like you dumped black pepper on the pants legs.

So the problem is in your environment first and foremost and you must kill the fleas NOT living on your dog while you also deal with those actually biting him at the moment. Fleas cycle very rapidly from egg to larvae to biting SOB. It is somewhere in the seven day range and has been pointed out - they can lay dormant for an idefinite period until you vibrate the ground and wake them up.

Removing the dog from the area will help the dog but not the flea problem. I don't know the chemicals any more that will work and never did treat the yard agressively. When we were in Tampa, we bombed our houses with D-Con Four Gone every week for three weeks in a row. You have to leave the house, cover your food or throw it out and come back home four hours later. You HAD to do this three weeks in a row in order to try and break the egg, larvae, adult flea cycle. The third week was killing the last of the hatched larvae according to their cycle of life. It did not work forever but did keep things tolerable for a few months at a time. In Tampa, nothing weather-wise kills fleas so what you are dealing with this year is every day in Tampa.

I do not know any chemicals to use today but get something serious on the grass, dirt and structures and do it three weeks in a row - maybe four if I was fighting what sounds like an intolerable situation! What we had available back in Tampa in the 70's has been banned for permanant DNA damage and every other chemical sin known to mankind. ;-)

Hell, I was using Silvex on chickweed in the yard and only later when they banned it did we find out it was the active ingredient in Agent Orange. You shoud have seen that woody stemmed chickweed disappear though!

Obviously, kill all the fleas on the dog at the same time. You can break the cycle but it ain't easy!

Doug Meyer - one flea bit dude from back in the day.