For millions of dogs and people, the small flea is a remorseless enemy. The flea is a tiny, brown, wingless insect that uses specialized mouth parts to pierce the skin and siphon blood. When a flea bites your dog, it injects a little amount of saliva into the skin to prevent blood coagulation. many animals can have fleas without showing pain, but an unfortunate number of dogs become sensitized to this saliva. In exceptionally allergic animals, the bite of a single flea may be create hard itching and scratching. Fleas create the most common skin condition of dogs which is flea allergy or dermatitis.

 If your dog develops supersensitivity to flea saliva, many changes may result.   A tiny hive may develop at the location of the fleabite, which will either heal or develop into a tiny red bump that at some point crusts over.  The pet will scratch and chew at himself until the area is hairless, raw and weeping serum. This can create hair loss, redness, scaling, microbial infection and increased coloring of the skin.

 

Remember that the flea spends the most its life in the environment, not on your pet, so it can be challenging to find. In fact, your pet can continue to scratch without you ever seeing a flea on your pet. Check your pet carefully for fleas or for signs of flea excrement (also called flea dirt), which looks like coarsely ground pepper. When moistened, flea dirt turns a reddish brown Because it contains blood. If one pet in the household has fleas, assume that all pets in the household have fleas. A single flea found on your dog probably means that there are hundreds of fleas, larva, pupa and eggs in your house.