Frontline Plus for Dogs: Want to know more about your enemy?

Can Frontline Plus for Dogs help here? Uninvited guests by the hundreds, maybe even thousands. You ask them to leave and they just don’t seem to be interested in any offer. Bloodsucking, leaping from here to there, itching, hiding, totally disgusting, incredibly ugly, irritating, egg laying, biting, and nearly indestructible metamorphosing machines. In one word, fleas. You love and enjoy your pet, your rugs, your sheets and clothes, your favorite rooms, and so do fleas. You know you either have to fight back or just put up with it, which for most people in most circumstances seems unacceptable. So let’s find ways to fight back. Frontline Plus for Dogs is a great place to start

Frontline Plus for Dogs: Knowledge About Fleas

The main problem is that fleas are nearly perfect at surviving and thriving. They are extremely hard to kill and even harder to eliminate over time. They enjoy heat and humidity. They are incredibly effective at reproducing. And they go through a complex 4-stage development: egg becomes larva becomes pupa becomes adult. The entire cycle can be as short as two weeks, or as long as a couple of seasons. The flea, at each stage, seems to have adapted protective mechanisms to help it survive. Not only that, but different types of fleas have adapted to different environments, so there are cat fleas and dog fleas and rabbit fleas and about two thousand other varieties of fleas, each adapted to a specific environment. We indeed have a very sophisticated enemy that must not be underestimated. Our main focus is what are some methods you can use to control and hopefully eliminate fleas from your pet and your living area, especially since fleas spend at least 3/4 of their life somewhere other than on their host. Frontline Plus for Dogs is a very effective ally in your battle against fleas because it gives your pet coverage that lasts about 30 days and it attacks fleas chemically at each of its main cycles: larva/pupa and adult.

Frontline Plus for Dogs

Fleas are ugly and repulsive. Adult fleas have a large mouth designed to pierce skin and suck blood. They also have long back legs for jumping. They are flightless and generally sightless. They have a narrow body so that they can squeeze through dense fur. They have a very hard shell that can withstand huge pressures. And adult fleas are driven to find a host within a week or two at the most, because the female cannot lay eggs until she has found a source of blood, without which she dies. A single female can lay as many as 500 eggs over her life that may last 2 months or longer. The eggs will tend to roll off or be swept off the surface they were laid on, and end up in dense fur, in folds of clothing, in carpets or in small cracks in any surface. High humidity and warm temperatures are all that is needed. Fleas are famous carriers of lots of different diseases, including the dreaded Black Plague that killed 30-60% of the European population between 1348 and 1350 and again in the 15th and 17th Centuries. Other flea-borne diseases or related disorders include typhus, tapeworms, dermatitis, anemia, alopecia, Lyme disease, rickettsial pox, and other bacterial or parasitical infections.

Eggs hatch into larvae in 2 to 14 days depending on the environment. A flea larva can go dormant in hostile environments, or take as little as 1 week to turn into a pupae, which can turn into an adult in another quick 7 days. The larva and the pupa survive on any organic material including skin flakes or tiny year-old vegetable matter. They might even be able to eat and survive on dust. The adult must find blood to eat within a week or so, but they are very good at finding acceptable hosts. They have biochemical sensors that help them recognize nearby living targets, and then they can jump up to 200 times their body length to get to their promised land: a warm and dark place where they use their adapted mouthparts to pierce skin and suck blood. If humans could jump that far, well…two or three football fields would be a snap, and we could jump over four by giving it all we had.

Frontline Plus for Dogs: Flea Control

It Takes Regular and Disciplined Treatment to let Frontline Plus for Dogs eliminate fleas from your pet and your household.

The flea’s developmental life cycles are so variable and complex that a single treatment cannot possibly eradicate the infestation. If you just do a single treatment, you may kill a few fleas, or maybe a few hundred fleas, but they’ll be back visiting in short order, perhaps in ever-increasing numbers. Instead, fleas have to be attacked over time with several different approaches, corresponding to the 4 stages in which fleas develop.

For pets, you will probably use what is called Integrated Pest Management (IPM), which uses two different types of chemicals to target adult fleas and developing fleas. Your veterinarian can help you design a program for your dog or cat or other furry friend. But one of the problems is that many flea medicines also affect mammals, so more is not necessarily better. There are a few natural substances like cedar oil that can help the process, but there is no single silver bullet, no single solution. What you are trying to do is disrupt the life cycle over time, and this will in turn drastically lower and perhaps eliminate the infestation. Recent advances in pesticide delivery techniques, such as that found in Frontline Plus for Dogs, are really starting to make life easier for people who are willing to take the time to regularly treat for fleas

For the home, you’ll have to get used to regular vacuuming. A lot of experts recommend putting a flea collar in your vacuum bag to kill the incoming eggs and subsequent stages. Either that or dispose of every bag immediately. You will have to wash your own sheets and bed clothes in hot water. And you’ll have to pay special attention to the area around the place your pet sleeps.

Over time, you’ll probably have to continue to treat for fleas. They don’t like low humidity, they don’t like low temperatures, they don’t like that vacuum cleaner, and they don’t like the chemicals that we have developed to interrupt their disgusting life cycle. Try Frontline Plus for Dogs to have a very good chance at disrupting the life cycle described above.