Determine if Your Dog has Fleas

Video Transcript

" Hi this is Elise McMahon with expertvillage.com and this video series we are going to talking about flea and tick prevention. If you like to find more about my services you can visit my website canineheadstart.com. So in this short clip we are going to be talking about how do you find out, how do you determine whether your dog haves fleas. One of the best ways is to go over your dog regularly. Especially during flea and tick season. One area that fleas like to hang out or you see them in one of the reason you see them here is because there is not as much fur but right here in the belly of the dog. There is not as much fur here but typically the dogs legs are close not laying down it is nice and toasty and warm in here. So this is a easy place to see if your dog has fleas. Usually what you would see is a small black dot straying across your dog. So again one of the best ways is to examine your dog fairly regularly. There is something called a flea comb which is a comb with a tighten very very close together and what you can do with this you can run it through your dogs coat and see if you pick up any debris any flea debris. Is you got a dog with a very thick coat or with a very long coat is is going to be hard. You can see if separating this I only get to see a little skin at a time it is hard to see if there is any fleas. What this comb does it is so narrowly spaced together but it would actually pick up flea dirt and if there is flea in there it would pull them right out and then you would see them here in the comb. So you can just pick a spot on your dog and run the comb right down against the skin and then out towards the end of the hairs to see if they have any flea dirt. If you are not sure whether or not some of the black dots that you are picking up are his dirt from fleas one of the things that you can do is get a wet paper towel and knock them off knock what you are picking up off onto the wet paper towel and see if it gets a kind of brownish red color basically what it is that you are removing is the digested and is created blood meal so it is flea feces hat is drop on the dog. Many times your dog will have can have one or two fleas and not be infested with them. However if you are getting off large amounts of little black flea dirt that means that they have series infestation and it is probably means that your house has one as well."