Yes. Any pet can pick up fleas; any pet can have fleas. Some products repel, just like you and I put on bug spray to repel mosquitoes, but a lot of the preventative products that we have here require the flea to bite the pet to uptake that medication kills them, so it's possible.

Sometimes, those are a little small to see with the naked eye, but they can have some secondary reactions. It's not uncommon for pets to be allergic to flea saliva, but we can see some secondary skin infections because of fleas. And so you might see red bumps, pimples, ulcerated areas, maybe some scabs, or things like that.

No. Other than visual confirmation, or the evidence that we see of fleas being there, there's no blood test or anything like that that we'll do here at the clinic.

Flea dirt is digested blood, and so we have a fun trick here that we'll do in the clinic where, if we're suspicious of it, we'll put that dirt on a paper towel, and we'll get it wet. And what happens to dried blood when you get it wet is, it turns back into that normal red blood color.

Sometimes it's as simple as running my finger against the growth of the hair to look at that skin deep down to see if I can see any. Sometimes I don't see the actual live flea itself, but I can see some evidence that they've been there in terms of what we call flea dirt, which is flea poop. As gross as it sounds, that's what it is, the fecal material of the flea that they leave behind while they're on your pet.