FLEA CONTROL TABLETS
These work by sterilizing the female flea with a hormone, so that when she lays eggs, they will not hatch. This breaks the cycle of fleas at the beginning.
While this is much safer for pets than toxic pesticides, it is still “unnatural,” but can be helpful while you are getting your environment under control if your pet already has fleas.
ESTABLISH A FLEA CONTROL PROTOCOL
Flea control is on ongoing process. It is best to make a plan and follow it, to be sure you cover all the steps.
In order to control fleas, it is necessary to understand their life cycle:
ADULT
When you see fleas hopping on your cat or dog and trying to jump onto you, they are in the adult stage. The average life span of an adult flea is about 6 weeks, but they can live up to a year under certain conditions.
The adult flea spends almost all of its time on your dog or cat and will not leave voluntarily unless their population becomes excessively large (and then they are happy to jump on humans). If you want fleas to leave their natural environment (your pet), you have to kill or remove them yourself.
EGG
A female flea can lay 20 to 25 eggs a day, and may lay several hundred eggs over her lifetime. These eggs fall off the pet and develop where they land, such as your carpet and sofa, and even in cracks in wood floors and other small crevices.
LARVA A larvae hatches from the flea egg. It can entwine in fabric fibers and just wait for its chance to grow.
PUPA The larva forms a pupae and waits for the right time to develop under the right conditions. It can take as few as 9 days to as long as 200 days to go through its growth stages.
This is the real problem stage, because the pupa is resistant to just about everything. Even when you kill all the adults, eggs and larvae, you will have fleas again in about two weeks when the pupae fully develop.
ADULT
When the pupae develop, out come the adults, who lay eggs, up to 25 a day, and thus the cycle starts again.
Fleas reproduce faster than kittens or bunnies — in one month, ten females can generate over 267,000 offspring.