PIN: Homemade Flea Shampoo for Pets

I’ve known that animal rescue groups recommended Dawn liquid soap to wash kittens too young for flea treatments but I saw this on Pinterest and thought I’d give it a try. It combines equal parts of Dawn liquid dish detergent with vinegar. I mixed it into a squirt bottle and both dogs got a bath.

Lessons Learned: Reported success with dogs, only one of the two had a live flea during brushout. On the barn kitty, it reduced the fleas but still a lot there. Barn kitty was the worst infected and lives outdoors so while better then nothing, I think for outdoor pets, other chemicals may be needed.

Not quite sure that this removed any more fleas than just a bath would have… but it was cheap to put together and probably did exterminate a few more than just simple, non flea, shampoo. It might be more effective if you leave the soap on for a full 3-5 minutes like flea and tick shampoo has in the instructions.

Future Use: Liked it for the dogs but I think I’ll follow up with an aloe vera conditioner as they had rough skin due to the flea issue.

Note! This won’t cure your flea problem because they are in the house, the bedding etc… so the house needs to be treated. Fleas also have a life cycle so while you killed the adults, you still have eggs that will hatch and give you more fleas! Although, if you don’t have a bad issue with fleas you can just keep bathing the animals, using a flea comb to remove active fleas and you can destroy the flea population that way. It just takes a lot longer and patience.

Edited to Add: after doing this once more, and seeing what happened, I can tell you pretty conclusively that this recipe kills no more fleas then a regular bath would (we did one dog with regular shampoo and another with the Dawn concoction). It also dries out the dogs’ skin something terrible!