3 Reasons Why Your Pets May Be Attracting Pests to Your Home
Discover why your pets may be attracting pests to your home: food and water availability, pet waste, and outdoor activities. Take preventive measures now!
Pets are great for homes, adding excitement, relaxation, or comfort. People often treat them as members of the family, letting them roam the house and play around as they please. This usually does not end up with many issues (excluding the occasional bathroom trip upstairs), or at least on the surface, it doesn’t.
Your pets may attract pests, such as raccoons or mice, even without your or their knowledge. It can be hard to discover what your pets are attracting and can be even harder to find out why they’re doing so. This article covers the top three reasons why your pets may be attracting pests, and we’ll explain how you might be able to solve this issue.
Reason #1: Open Pet Food
As with all animals, pests need food. Remember, open pet food containers are anybody’s game. That’s why it’s important to make sure that you securely feed your pets to prevent animals, such as scavenging raccoons, from entering your property. If you have an outdoor food bowl, it can very easily and quickly attract scavenging or hungry animals. The most important thing to prevent pests from gathering near your home is to secure pet food. It is that simple. Many pests, like raccoons, mice, and rats, leave after you remove their incentive.
Feeding animals indoors or using lockable/coverable food storage is the best way to protect your pet food. You also need to monitor and secure your trash as well, as any remaining morsels of food could inevitably lead to a large raccoon exploring your trash can with his friends.
Reason #2: Pets as Shelters
Most animals with large amounts of fur have large amounts of body heat, something attractive towards smaller pests such as fleas, ticks, or bedbugs. These pests have poor heat regulation and coverage, both things that fur or hair combats. In addition to fur holding in body heat, it also makes it much more difficult to notice any bites or even bugs on a pet’s body. That’s why it’s important to not only get your pets specific medicine against pests such as these but to also check them during flea and tick season.
The easiest way to get rid of a situation like this is to make sure to check your pets for fleas and ticks occasionally. If pests do slip by, and your pets end up bringing large amounts of pests into your home, contact a pest removal company, while replacing sheets and pillows, cleaning often.
Reason #3: Pets are Hard to Clean Up After
On top of the ability to bring pests into your home through their immediate vicinity, pets can also attract pests in another way. Pet droppings and urine are prime examples of things that could attract pests, and it’s difficult to clean up everything a pet may leave behind. Mice and rats are the most common pests to respond to pet droppings since they can use them as food. Urine can also fester mosquito larvae if left for too long.
That’s why it’s important to do the easy thing and clean up after your pets where you see them, taking care to ensure no droppings or urine makes it inside. Getting rid of potential food and homes for pests will help force them to go elsewhere or die off.
