How to Keep Gnats Away from Your Pets and Prevent Allergic Reactions
Keeping your pets safe is a full-time job, as there are pests and other annoyances everywhere you look. You of course want to make sure you’re always keeping them safely fed, with quality food from trusted suppliers that use good ingredients, while also ensuring you give them the regular exercise that they always crave. These basic steps can go a long way towards keeping your pets in top shape, but another thing you want to consider is pest control.
Pet care in Saint Francisville, LA boils down mostly to being careful and attentive, and pest control is no different. You want to make sure you’re sticking to any prescribed medications for issues like heartworm, and keeping gnats away from your pets is a great way to minimize allergies in pets as well. With this in mind, our team of experienced pet care technicians has put together some tips to help you keep gnats at bay.
What are gnats, and what do they do?
Insects are one of the real menaces to pet care in Saint Francisville, LA, and gnats are one of the biggest troublemakers of them all. Gnats are tiny insects that lay eggs in and love to live near water, and they feed by drinking the blood of warm-blooded animals, much like mosquitoes do. They are mostly just an annoyance to people, but they can cause infections in animals like dogs. They will create a wound that will bleed openly and then lay eggs in it, giving the dog a blood-borne infection, which can really impact the animal’s health, especially if your pet is older or has a compromise immune system.
Natural remedies to try
We recommend attempting natural remedies first, since they are the least likely to have the potential to harm your pets through improper application or other variables. Pet care in Saint Francisville, LA is up to the owners, but we find it’s usually best to go natural routes and then try other methods.
One easy way in which you can prevent gnats if you have a green thumb is through the planting of marigolds around your outdoor space. It’s been proven that gnats can’t stand the smell of marigolds, so they avoid them whenever possible. You can also try sprays on your pet, like using witch hazel or olive oil as a base and adding cedarwood or neem oil at a 10:1 ratio, since gnats don’t like these either.
Other remedies
You can also find gnat remedies on the market that involve applying treatments to your lawn. These are usually safe for pets, but make sure you do your research and speak to pest control experts before going this route, because you want to be sure it’s safe for kids and pets alike. Many of these applications are made of natural oils and are perfectly safe to apply, but others use harsher chemicals that you really want to take a hard look at before trusting.
Gnats can cause allergic reactions and potentially give diseases to your pets, and the team at St. Francisville Animal Hospital wants you to stay happy and healthy with smart gnat prevention. Call us for any other pet care tips you might need in Saint Francisville, LA!
Categorised in: Puppy Training