Fleas - and my secret weapon

Your dog hates fleas, and so do you. But fleas love you and your dog.

Your dog has nice fur to hide in and nice blood to suck and you have warm dry places in your house for flea larva to grow up in. Just a wonderful situation for a mommy flea to raise hundreds of baby fleas.

I have a secret weapon against fleas. I don't know if there's a conspiracy to keep it a secret so that the pet supply people can make money selling more expensive products or if it's just that people don't know better.

It's certainly true that people who sell the expensive stuff have no real motivation to tell you about the cheap and easy stuff. There's probably no conspiracy, but it sometimes seems like one.

I really don't like putting poisons on my dogs, or in my house.

I had a serious flea problem in my house many years ago, and I decided to see if I could solve it without resorting to toxic substances. I went to my local pet shop and started reading labels. I found several products that said they had a poison for immediately killing the adult fleas, and also "precor" for preventing any existing flea eggs or larva from becoming adult biting fleas.

That looked promising. I searched the shelves for a product that contained precor or some other "IGR" - (Insect Growth Regulator?) without the immediately killing poison. Couldn't find one, but at least I had a place to start. The internet was new, but I had access and I managed to find a mail order source for precor with no other additives.

I paid about $15 for enough of the product to treat my medium sized house. When it arrived I mixed it with water, put it in a garden sprayer and did the carpets and floors in the whole house and took the dogs out for the day. When we got home that evening it was dry and there was a slight odor that wasn't unpleasant. There were still lots of fleas. No surprise.

Gradually over the next few weeks the fleas vanished. By a month from when I had treated the house there were absolutely no fleas in the house or on the dogs. Hmmm.

The stuff claims to last 7 months, and it seems to live up to that claim. I try to remember to treat the house every 6 months, and the fleas never returned.

A few years ago I tried to order some precor and I was told there was now a better product on the market that did the same action but more effectively. So I ordered it. Nylar, it was called. Just like the precor it comes in tiny bottles that are meant to be mixed with a gallon or so of water and sprayed on carpets and floors. Since then that's what I've been using. And I simply don't have flea problems.

I always have at least two dogs living in my house, usually three or four, and often seven or eight. They have full run of the house and yard. If anyone should have fleas, I should. But I don't. I've told several friends about the products, and they tried them and loved them, and have no problems with fleas.

Since I've figured out how it works and how to use it I usually divide the house into two or three sections and do one section at a time, leaving that part closed up for a few days. That way I keep from exposing myself or my dogs to it without having to leave the house. I don't have any reason to believe it would do us any harm, but I figure it can't hurt to be extra careful.

The product I'm currently using is one that contains Nylar as its only active ingredient, and supposedly also controls roaches, flies, mosquitoes, ants and more.

So what do you think? Is it a conspiracy to keep selling the more expensive product? One seller I asked said that people are too impatient to use a product that doesn't get rid of the fleas immedately. That doesn't make much sense to me. They could continue using their old methods while they wait a month for their fleas to die off. But they don't know about it because nobody told them.

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