My dog has fleas despite prevention. Can they lay eggs? What now?

If your dog is on a high quality flea preventative (Nexgard, Bravecto, Advantix) every month, I would be very surprised if there are any flea eggs. If you look closely at your dog's hair coat, flea eggs resemble a grain of salt and are often confused with dry skin flakes. If fleas are present, you would be more likely to see adult fleas or flea "dirt" (feces). Flea dirt looks like a fleck of pepper and turns reddish brown when moistened with water on a damp paper towel. Flea eggs could be transferred to clothing by direct contact, but they would not be able to grow and reproduce without a warm blooded host, such as a dog or cat.

Unfortunately it’s impossible to know if any of the adult fleas laid any eggs before they were killed by the tablet. Female fleas with a 50 eggs every single day and the eggs will hatch out in 3 to 6 months. Therefore it’s anyone’s guess as to if cleaning and using the rest of your pills will work or if there are already eggs in the environment that will not hatch out for 3 to 6 months. Your best option is to put her on a monthly flea pill like Simparica. If your puppy is going to travel around, it is a better option to keep her on prevention then to try to deal with and worry about an infestation. Certainly vacuuming every day, washing bedding and any other area where the puppy goes may help but you may not remove all the flea eggs. I hope this helps and please feel free to post any additional questions.

It might be a flea that jumped on him after the application, this can happen but if you find more than one and they are alive then the product you are using is likely not working and you need to change it to something else such as Bravecto, Advantage or Revolution.

Fleas require a host like a dog or cat to complete their life cycle. If a flea egg got on your clothing it could hatch, but the flea would then die. Advantage also contains a medication that prevents flea eggs from hatching, so if the flea had been on your pet before it jumped off and died the egg would not hatch.

Why take the chance? just treat your dog with a high quality flea preventive treatment and then you can rule out fleas, that is the only way to rule it out completely as fleas and eggs can be missed by the naked eye.

You should not worry if no more signs have shown and your dog is on a high quality flea preventative. You are doing exactly what you need to do in order to prevent fleas in your home. Keep up the good work!

You can also check for little black specks on his fir closest to his skin called flea dirt. Likely though if you apply flea prevention and the doctor found no evidence he should be ok but if you find these little black specks of dirt, a way to conform if it is indeed flea dirt is take a paper towel, wet it, and smear the dirt specks around. Normal dirt will not look any different after doing this however flea dirt will have a reddish color to it