The tactic is changed to capture and rehabilitation. The SPCA provides a trap and she is hauled off the next day. The kittens can’t be found by crawling under the house. They show up a day latter and are captured and tamed. It turns out some of the ductwork was split apart and they were crawling up inside the tube. Nice and toasty as I heat the underside of the house.
The kittens live for a month in the garage and get real fat and friendly. the dog loves herding them in the dog run but eventually they go off to new homes leaving only memories and fleas! the basement floor looks like someone spilled a box of pepper and it’s moving!
Getting rid of fleas is a daunting task. Flea bombs with the highest amount of poison in them applied repeatedly. One bomb placed on the crawl space on the dirt where the cat was and one in the middle of the basement every 5 to 7 days. The flea has this 10-day life cycle in four stages. the poison says it kills three out of four stages so after bombing you have to wait for the new ones to hatch out to kill them as well. What the brochure doesn’t tell you is they don’t all hatch out at once so if you wait 2 weeks like they say you will always miss some. Use the saturation technique and make the space so nothing can live (after all it is the basement.) The fleas can also live a long time without food as the larvae eat the adult scat. Yuck.
The fleas on the dog and in the house are actually easier. She gets restricted to the kitchen and office so only the office carpet needs spraying with a topical spray and then lots of vacuuming in the whole house.
The dog gets flea spray, brushing, vacuuming a couple of times and the best of all, a bath in Dawn dish soap. It actually kills the fleas and you can see them getting rinsed off. These were “cat” fleas so they prefer cats to dogs and humans so they actually went away without too much action in the house. The basement was more persistent probably due to the moisture and temperature.
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