Liv wrote:Well we tried the dawn stuff last night... ran out at 10pm to Food Lion for it.... it seemed to calm her for the night... but she's back scratching again....
As far as the carpets... I'm about ready to rip them up... I wanted to last year... but ran out of money.... I want ceramic with area rugs... but don't have the do-re-mi....
I'll have to look in to getting some drugs for the dog I guess.... Too bad my offshore pharmacy doesn't have doggie stuff.
This is a very sad story Liv! Unfortunately, you obviously have fleas in the carpet. (Can you see them jumping when somebody walks across the carpet?
This is definitely a health issue for your kids. AND your parents because if they have that dog in their house, their house is probably infested worse than yours. The thing is, the dog is now gone from your house, and fleas will bite people when there isn't a dog handy. And if there are enough fleas, they will bite anybody they can reach. (Their eggs can't hatch unless the female has a good blood meal.) So while they prefer dogs, they will bite people if that is their only source of a blood meal.
Anyway, if the carpets are infested, bathing the dog will only kill the fleas on the dog. But as soon as the dog lays down, the fleas in the carpet will jump right on. It is hopeless to just treat the dog--you have to get the carpets professionally treated too.
This happened to us one year when we lived on a farm. The fleas were so bad that year that the flea products we put on the two dogs didn't work very well. They got flea infested anyway. They were house dogs at the time. Our house became so horribly infested that none of the off-the-shelf products worked. Bathing the dogs is not effective in that situation because the main body of fleas are not on the dog--they are in your carpet. Fleas pupate fairly soon after they hatch, and the nasty things hatch after only a few days. Their life cycle is such that they can go from newly laid egg to adult in just two weeks! But if there is not a blood source near, they can stay in their cocoons for months. On the other hand, they can reproduce and grow up very rapidly if there are animals in their area. I found on an exterminator web site that just 10 fertilized female fleas can turn into a quarter of a million fleas in 30 days!
So, do what we did. Get a professional exterminator. It isn't going to be cheap. They will have to come at least once a week for about a month but they WILL get rid of the fleas. They have products much stronger than you can buy as a layperson. (You need a license to get the stuff they use). By stronger, I don’t mean more toxic. Their products are less toxic because they use insect hormones to destroy the lifecycle—those products are called growth regulators and they stop the insects from maturing or something. By the way, your parents' house is certainly as bad or worse than yours if they let the dog in the house. I wonder if they are aware of that flea infestation.
