You've all heard the little ditty...."there ain't no fleas on me"! Fleas are those pesky little critters, about the size of a pencil lead that cause all kinds of trouble for you and your pets. Well, ‘tis the season to get ahead of the fleas.

Imagine a flea biting you...or maybe you don’t have to imagine it. Flea bites itch really bad! That’s why your dog or cat will scratch, bite, and chew themselves raw. The most common allergy that dogs and cats have is to flea bites.

In dogs, fleas like to hang out by the base of the tail. To find fleas on your cat look around the head and neck. Cats are such good groomers that the fleas know not venture out onto the tummy...they'll get caught for sure!

It’s bad enough for your pet to be miserable from fleas, but try to sleep through the jingle jangle of your pet’s tags clanging against their collar all night long. One remedy for that is to tape the tags together so they don’t bang around. But then you have to deal with the hind leg thumping against the floor all night long to the beat of old bubblegum music like “Yummy, yummy, yummy I've got love in my tummy”!

A better way to approach flea season is to prevent fleas in the first place. There are several effective flea preventive medications on the market, when used monthly, prevent fleas from becoming a problem. Advantage, Frontline and Revolution are all good topical flea preventives. An oral tablet called Comfortis is also very effective. These are all administered monthly and work well.

It’s bad enough that you and your pet are miserable when they have fleas but there other concerns. Fleas are the number one source for your pet getting tapeworms. Fleas are known as the intermediate host for tapeworm and spread the parasite when your pet finds and eats a flea.

If you think fleas are a nuisance, tapeworms are worse (and they’re just gross). They cause intestinal disease, are expensive to get rid of, and have the potential to infect humans in certain circumstances. If you don’t break the flea life cycle and get them under control, your pet will just get tapeworms over and over.

Fleas are bad, and as I always like to say, “drugs r good!” Well, you know what I mean.