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Can We Get Lice From Or Give Lice To Our Pets?

Head lice are an irritant for parents to have to deal with since they love to afflict children. There’s plenty of advice around about how to detect lice on your children, how to prevent a head lice infestation and how to treat the problem when it arises. One question that occasionally comes up is whether you have to worry about any pets in your home if you find a child has lice.

IF FIDO HAS LICE, IT’S DIFFERENT FROM YOURS

Many animals have lice, but these tend to be species-specific breeds of these parasitic insects. Lice that have evolved to become those that infest humans are acclimated to the temperature and environment on our scalp and can’t live for long on animals. The six legs on human head lice are adept at helping them grab onto and move along human hair strands. The temperature at our scalp is also fairly unique to us, and your pets just won’t be the same. Your dog’s head would be some kind of an alien environment out of a Star Trek episode to any lice that accidentally fell off you and landed on your dog. They would die in about 24 hours just as they would if they fell off onto a carpet or couch without the nourishing environment that they require on our head.

THEY CAN’T KEEP LICE, BUT THEY CAN TRANSPORT THEM

Our head lice can hitch a ride on your family dog or cat if one falls onto them in the course of a child infested with lice playing with them. Then, if another child comes along and plays with the pup too, it can find a new home on them. Typically though, lice won’t live long enough on family pets for this to be a problem. For this reason, if you find a lice infestation in your home, your pets should be a second priority after treating the actual infestation on the afflicted child’s head.

While seeking treatment for the head lice on any infested child’s head, it can be prudent to simultaneously wash any pets. This should be in conjunction with washing the child’s pillowcase and running their comb and hairbrush through the dishwasher or even putting it in boiling water. Again, they can’t live long off a human head, but they may not have to if some other kid uses that brush or comb or picks up that pet before the lice have died.

HANDLING THE LICE ON YOUR HEAD

If your dog or cat catch their own variety of lice, you’ll have to seek a separate treatment for them from anything available for treating lice on us. In the case of us humans, many lice have grown immune to the insecticides in over-the-counter lice shampoos since they’ve been used for so long. Fortunately, you do still have a fast, effective and affordable option to rid your family of this annoyance.

For families in or around Chester County, Pennsylvania, we offer the best head lice treatment center Chester County has to offer. At Lice Lifters of Chester County, our lice technicians know everything there is to know about detecting and then eradicating lice and doing so using all-natural products that are 100 percent safe for your children. We also get the job done in one appointment, and you have our Lice Lifters Guarantee that our hair lice treatment clinic will perform. If any of your kids get lice, don’t let them suffer from the redness, itching and irritation of these pests when we can eliminate them for you.

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