Pet & Animal: How to Kill Fleas in a Home

Fleas are small, agile insects that live by feeding on the blood of other animals, usually your furry and harmless cat or dog. Fleas can be a real problem when they invade a household and its inhabitants. Here's an outline of the different ways to eradicate fleas in both your house and on your pets.

Steps

Treating Your Home For Fleas

Use botanical dust mixed with Borate acid. The easiest way to kill fleas is when they are at their most vulnerable — in the egg and larva stages of their development. An adult flea will live only about a week without blood from its host, while a flea larva can live several months, so it's important to attack the larvae first. This mixture will help prevent a full bloom of fleas.
- Botanical dusts are perhaps the oldest natural insecticides. Borates are minerals that are used widely as wood preservatives, detergents, and insecticides, acting as stomach poisons to fleas.^[1]
- The botanical dust and borate mixture is very safe. Care, however, should be taken not to breathe in the botanical dust and borate mixture. Use a mask when applying the dust mixture in the home
- Dust the carpet, the furniture, the bed, the dog or cat's bed. It's best to do this when you're leaving your house for a good while, say 24 hours. Let the mixture settle for a day. When you come back, vacuum the carpet, the furniture, and wash the sheets on both beds.

Fill shallow bowls of water with dish detergent. The water and dish detergent mixture is like a toxic swimming pool for fleas. When they jump into the mixture, they die.
- Place the water and detergent mixture in a very shallow bowl, low enough to the ground so that the fleas accidentally hop into it. An old frisbee does the job quite well.
- Place the mixture next to a low-hanging light source, preferably a night-light. The fleas are attracted to the light. Approaching the light, many of them will fall into the mixture, dying in the process.

Use a lemon solution in affected areas. Thinly slice one whole lemon and drop it into a pint of water. Bring the water and lemon to a boil. Then, let stand overnight for maximum potency. Pour into a spray bottle and spray onto affected areas.

Use cedar chips in affected areas. Cedar chips are available in your local pet or home improvement store. Fleas hate the smell of cedar and will do almost anything to avoid it.
- Make sure your pet isn't allergic to cedar.^[2] Many dogs can be allergic to cedar. So while shooing the fleas away is a good thing, making your dog miserable clearly isn't.
- Place cedar chips in the corners of rooms, in the dog's pen or bed, and under furniture. Keep cedar chips near threshold like doors and windows in order to keep the fleas from coming in.
- Place cedar chips in a cotton cloth underneath your pillow and, if possible, in your bedding. This will ensure that your bed remains pest-free. Plus, it will make your bed smell nice and fresh.

Spread salt over the surface of your carpet. Salt is a desiccant, meaning it saps the moisture from things and dries them out. When a salt crystal attaches itself to a flea, it will cause chafing and scraping on the flea, essentially bleeding the flea to death as it walks.
- Use very fine-grained salt for this. The finer the better; you want it to be small enough to attach itself to the flea.
- After 7-10 days, vacuum the salted area very thoroughly, making sure to pick up all the salt and flea carcasses from the carpet area. Repeat the process one or two more times.
- When you're done vacuuming, discard the old vacuum bag from the vacuum and replace it with a new one.

Vacuum, vacuum, vacuum. Vacuum over any affected areas, including high-traffic areas where the pets usually roam. Most fleas will not be able to survive a good tornado of a vacuum!
- People often go for high-powered, super-suction vacuums, but the average vacuum should do the trick perfectly.^[3]
- Place moth flakes down on the carpet or (inside the vacuum bag) and vacuum them up. This will help kill any fleas you vacuum up!
- Always discard the vacuum bag after you vacuum. This will help discourage re-infestation.

Purchase flea traps. Flea traps work in much the same way as the lighted detergent water combo (above, Step 2) works. Fleas are attracted to the heat and the brightness of the light, and fall into the trap.

Treating Your Pet For Fleas

Clean your pet regularly. Washing your pet will help kill the fleas that are living on it. There may be a host of other larvae and fleas waiting to hop onto your pet, however, so be sure to use this method with other preventative measures, such as vacuuming, borate mixes, and cedar chips.
- Prepare your dog for the bath by applying the flea soap near the dog's ears, eyes, nose, mouth, and butt. When fleas feel water, they immediately look for safe places on the dog to hide out, such as the anus. Do this before you get the dog wet.
- After you've applied the soap to the dog's vulnerable areas, get the dog wet and lather the whole body up. Let stand for at least ten minutes, working in the soap as much as possible. Comb out the dead fleas when dried.
- If your dog doesn't react well to flea soap, try acquiring soap that has eucalyptus, tea tree oil, or cedar wood in it. Fleas don't like the oils of these trees, so use them to your benefit.

Use a flea product on your cat or dog. Flea products, such as Advantage or Frontline, are spot-treatments that are applied to pets monthly.
- Usually, these spot-treatments are rubbed on the skin of your pet, usually between the shoulder blades. The treatment will then work its way through the dog or cat's coat.
- If your pet reacts adversely to the spot treatment, try a healthy bit of Vaseline instead. Rub the Vaseline on the same spot, between the shoulder blades or bottom of the neck. Fleas that jump onto the Vaseline will not be able to dislodge and die soon after.

Add deterrents to the pet's meal. Since fleas feed on the blood of animals, you can treat fleas by manipulating what your pet eats.
- There are oral tablets that you can give your pet. These tablets attack the flea’s nervous system via the bloodstream and tissue of your dog or cat. While they kill all the fleas feeding on your pet, they do not prevent fleas.
- Mix vinegar into their water. Don't try this with cats, as their pH is much more sensitive than dogs'. Mix a tablespoon of apple-cider vinegar into the dog's water bowl, or bathe the animal using water and vinegar.

Video

Tips

Before giving your pet a flea bath, wash your hands and arms (up to the elbow) with the pet's flea shampoo. This will prevent fleas from jumping on you during the bath, biting you, and then re-infecting the pet. Take a shower immediately after washing your pet because some flea shampoos can cause irritation when left on human skin for prolonged periods of time. Lavender or Rosemary-mint products (shampoo & body wash) are good flea repellants as well.

Sprinkle salt on rugs and leave for 12-24 hours and then vacuum. The salt will kill fleas but do not leave salt in your rug for too long, it can become moist.

Buy a flea collar for inserting it inside the vacuum cleaner bag. Cut it into inch long pieces and save them in a baggie. Put one piece in a new vacuum cleaner bag. This will kill any fleas that survive being vacuumed off the floor, furniture, etc.

When searching for fleas, you may also find something called "flea dirt." It's black and coarse and if you put it on a moistened towel, it will turn red. Flea dirt is the blood that fleas expel as waste from their bodies. It's a good indication of where they've been.

Be sparing with the use of insecticides. Use in well-ventilated areas and wear gloves. If possible, seek natural alternatives and try to bedding clean. Repeated exposure to insecticides can be harmful to pet and human health.

Make sure you get all of the fleas out from the infected areas completely or in some rare cases the fleas may not go in one go but they can surely go when you have repeated the processes twice or thrice.