Jump To Section

Obvious Signs of Fleas in Your Home

Learn From The Pro's

Seeing a flea is a tell-tale sign that there are fleas in the home, but what if you don’t see any fleas? How can you tell if you have them? There are some obvious signs of fleas in your home to look for. Check for flea bites, welts on animals, unexpected hair loss on pets, and/or flea eggs in your carpets. You can also try the tape test or the white sock test.

Obvious Signs of Fleas in Your Home

Finding a flea in your living room is one of those things that tends to strike fear into homeowners. How can such a tiny thing be so scary? For starters, it is an incredibly rare occurrence to have only one. Typically, when it comes to fleas—where there is one; there are many. You could be sitting on an infestation and not be any the wiser until it’s already out of control. How do you handle this invasion of insects without losing your sanity? First things first, you need to be on the lookout for the obvious signs of fleas in your home.

Finding Obvious Signs of Fleas In Your Home

When you see fleas on your pet you should recognize them as major indicators of a flea presence in your home. It’s important to learn how to detect fleas because they become more difficult to eliminate if left unnoticed for too long. Learn about obvious signs of fleas in your home with the following tips.

Flea Bites

If you’ve been bitten by fleas you will notice teeny-tiny little bumps that typically appear around your ankles. If you share your bed with your pet, flea bites can appear all over your body and may be confused with bed bug bites. Flea bites look like small red dots and are extremely itchy, which could become infected when scratched. They also can appear if fleas inhabit your furniture or clothes.

Unidentified Welts on the Animals

Does your animal have a strange red welt on its skin? Are they digging and scratching like crazy? This is likely to be caused by flea bites and obvious signs of fleas in your home.

When fleas bite the animal, their saliva gets onto the skin. Many pets are allergic to flea saliva. They respond with a bunch of digging and scratching—the itching is driving your fur baby crazy.

Keep in mind that simply having a bunch of bugs crawling on your pet’s body can cause them to react. If you’ve ever had head lice, it’s the same feeling for the animal; only it’s not just their head involved. No wonder they’re so miserable!

Your Animals Have Pale Gums

Fleas multiply overnight, so it’s only natural that a small problem can quickly turn into a nightmare. When your animals are constantly bitten, it causes their body to become deficient.

See, fleas drink the blood from your pet. While one flea getting on the pet and taking a drink is horrible, can you imagine if your pet gets bit over 100 times in one day? It can quickly happen if they have a lot of fleas on their body, all feeding at different intervals.

Not only is this miserable for your pet to be constantly bitten, but it’s draining their life-sustaining blood from their body. The easiest method to diagnose anemia in your pet involves examining their color, which in healthy pets should be a pinkish-red color. White is a cause for alarm and can be one of the obvious signs of fleas in your home.

Additionally, you can pull down the eyelids and see if they’re red or white. White under the eyelids is another sign of anemia.

If you notice these obvious signs of fleas in your home, visit a veterinarian immediately, as fleas can be life-threatening for pets.

Obvious Signs of Fleas in Your Home on your dogs

You Find Flea Eggs in Your Carpet

If you are trying to find flea eggs in your carpeting, you need to do some detective work. Start by using gloves and a magnifying glass. Flea eggs are hard to see with the naked eye, but you can easily see them with a magnifying glass.

To see these obvious signs of fleas in your home, start with getting down on the floor. Now, move the carpet fibers back and forth, looking for eggs. The eggs are small, white balls. You most definitely have a severe issue if you see eggs on your carpet. This is an infestation in the making. Vacuuming the rug can remove many of them to help control the birth of new pests (but, be sure to empty and clean the vacuum when your done–preferably outside!).

Do The Tape Test

Another way to test your carpets for obvious signs of fleas in your home is to see if fleas have moved in is by doing a tape test. Double-sided tape works great, or you can use a mouse glue trap. Place the test strip in an inconspicuous place where your animals can’t get to it.

If there are fleas on the tape in the morning, you will know you have an issue. If the tape is clear, the scratching is caused by something else. Another way is to set a bowl of water on the floor and see if it attracts any fleas overnight.

Do The White Sock Test

One of the best ways to tell if fleas are in your home is by the white sock test. The absence of flea bites on you or your pet does not mean there’s not a flea issue. This could just be the beginning stages of an infestation with the fleas hiding in your carpet, waiting to latch on. As strange as it sounds, this test helps to show obvious signs of fleas in your home.

Start by wearing white socks and walking around your home. Why white socks? First, they allow you to easily see the fleas, whereas other colored socks would camouflage them.

As you walk around, make sure you shuffle your feet a bit, as this helps stir up those fleas buried deep in the carpet’s fibers. Do you see anything hopping around your feet? Have any fleas attached themselves to your socks?

You can also leave the sock overnight in an area where the pets hang out to see if anything is on it by morning. If you see fleas on your white socks, you need to call a professional.

Side Note: Fleas do not shy away from hardwood floors because the cracks and crevices provide excellent shelter. This is especially true in older pine floors. Try the sock test here too.

Unexplained Hair Loss on Your Pets

Serious health problems can occur for your pets that are constantly scratching and itching from fleas. That’s why it’s so important to check for these obvious signs of fleas in your home. These risks become a bigger problem when you start seeing your pet lose hair and form bald spots, . When your pets experience sudden hair loss, it should be a cause for concern. This condition is known as alopecia.

Alopecia can happen for many reasons. One of which is excessive scratching from fleas. Did you know that some fleas are more apt to cause this condition than others? For instance, the cat flea is notorious for causing alopecia, while the sand flea isn’t much of a threat.

It all has to do with the flea’s saliva, the allergens of the pet, and the amount of digging and scratching they do. It would help if you had this hair loss evaluated by a vet as sometimes the hair won’t grow back. The more your animals dig and scratch at these areas, the more they build up scar tissue. So, it’s always best to have them evaluated and treat the skin irritation immediately.

Obvious Signs of Fleas in Your Home from flea dirt on your cat

There’s “Flea Dirt” on Your Pets

Flea dirt is a kind word for flea poop. Fleas, just like any other creature, must eliminate their waste. When petting your dog or cat, run your fingers through their hair. Do you feel anything gritty like sand?

You must understand that animals get grit and dirt on their fur, so you need to do more investigating. Get a paper towel and dampen it. Now, put a few of the pieces of grit on the towel. If it’s soil, it will remain brown. However, if it’s flea dirt, it will turn red when water is applied. This is definitely one of the obvious signs of fleas in your home.

What To Do When You Discover These Obvious Signs of Fleas in Your Home?

You’ve noticed all the signs of fleas in your home. Now what?

Preventative treatment will kill and repel fleas and ticks on your pet. They need this year-round and not just during peak flea season.

Bathe them with Dawn dish soap but don’t go overboard. The dish soap will only kill the ones on their body but does nothing to the fleas in your home. Overbathing will strip your pet of essential oils to keep your pet’s coat healthy.

Do this when you discover these signs of fleas in your home

Your vacuum cleaner is your best friend when you’re fighting fleas and on the lookout for obvious signs of fleas in your home. The rollers on the sweeper will get down deep into the carpets and loosen any eggs and live fleas. It will suck them up into the canister, and you can empty it outside. When you have a severe flea issue, you need to vacuum a couple of times each day to help dwindle the population.

Treat your carpets with a product especially made for fleas. This should be done before vacuuming, as you can eradicate some of the fleas and then sweep them away. Don’t forget to treat your yard. So many people focus on the pets and the carpet, but they don’t consider that the yard is the origin of your problem. Using a product that stops fleas in the yard is imperative.

Final Thoughts on Obvious Signs of Fleas in Your Home

Fighting fleas is a battle. You may think you’ve won a victory as you don’t see these obvious signs of fleas in your home and then BOOM they’re back again. Sadly, winning the war on fleas takes patience and consistency, and using a ton of chemicals will only make the fleas immune to the treatment.

Many people try methods to treat fleas on their own, not realizing Kapture Pest Control is a more effective option. An ongoing flea issue can make your pet sick–from fleas but also by coming in contact with the many methods you are using. Kapture Pest Control has treatment options that can quickly eliminate fleas without the risk.