Infestation
For a couple months I’ve wondered why flies lay eggs in our clothes. We keep our most-used clothing in a net that hangs from the van ceiling, and sometimes it’s damp - but there’s never food up there. I find what looks like small rice grains and shake them out or brush them off, and occasionally google this phenomenon cause it really is strange. But flies often sleep on our ceiling, so they must just find the net convenient?
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The kittens love that net - are the flies attracted to the cat’s hair or bits of mud and poop they inevitably leave behind?
We’ve tried keeping the cats out of the van at night so we can sleep, but it’s been raining extra this month and we’re sad when we listen to them cry on the roof, at the door, at the windows…we usually let them in eventually.
The other night Gris hopped onto my belly for cuddle-play. Sleepily, I tried to keep him away from Max. The dogs sleep under the covers, the cats run on top of the dogs, and Max hates it the most.
Then I felt something sticky on my stomach. I turned on a flashlight and saw two small worms on my stomach. I looked under Gris’ tail and saw another worm crawling out of his butt, and another on his leg.
I used a rag to wipe up those four, as well as the next six, and researched cat-worms on my phone in the dark. We haven’t found any on Fly yet but several more on Gris. Every time he crawls onto my pillow now I check his butt and we’ve brushed a bunch more out of our clothes net.
Sadly, though they have a litter box, the kittens usually poop in our gardens because the loose soil is ever-so-pleasant. This has been an ongoing problem because they dig up new transplants and I can’t even count the squash, flowers and beans we’ve lost to their hygenic digging. And guess what?! Those gardens all have tapeworms now, since each poop Gris leaves behind has worms. I’ve found hundreds of worms as well as what I think are egg capsules.
In our gardens.
That we eat from.
Are you scrolling with trepedation, wondering if I’m going to post pictures of worms or poop? Nope.
But I will show you how ugly our closest gardens look now.
The cats still don’t venture far from the homestead so we shouldn’t have tapeworms down the hill. Yet.
Yes, we got medicine and treated the kittens. So far the dogs don’t have anything crawling out of their butts, and we can be confident in that because we wipe their butts on a regular basis since they don’t, and we don’t like poop smears in bed.
We researched disposable sheets. I imagined the paper kind that doctors and massage therapists use. But queen-size? Turns out there’s a fancy version that parents of college students designed when they learned their kids didn’t wash their sheets all semester. We wondered if getting a weekly box of disposable sheets is convenient enough for lazy college students, or if those boxes just pile up?
Regardless, they’re $30 a set which is more expensive than cheap boxstore sheets, which (esp if 100% cotton) are also disposable/biodegradable. Then we read how much water is wasted to make them, so please don’t give them to us for Christmas:-)
I am afraid I’ll swallow a worm in my sleep, since we all know cats like to walk and lay on faces in the night. But apparently I won’t get infested unless I swallow a flea carrying tapeworms? What a strange world.
If you do want to see a tapeworm (in dirt, no poop) it’s the first image in this video:
3 Comments:
August 17, 2018
you are troupers!
August 18, 2018
What a relief that you won’t catch them from swallowing eggs on your produce! This reminds me to what extent we all swallow millions of living organisms everyday without realizing it. Still . . . . . . yuck!
Do the chickens like the tapeworms? And did the chicken start eating those other fat, juicy worms?
August 19, 2018
I’m so glad I checked online before feeding the tapeworms to the chickens because apparently they are terribly affected by them! I don’t know if they would get infected by eating them, or if they also need to eat an infested flea - but we’re not taking any chances!