The Real Reason Sprays Keep Putting Pets At Risk
The next morning, I called our vet's office just to ask if I'd overreacted.
The vet tech, Marcus, didn't think so.
"That's actually one of the most common accidental exposures we see," he told me.
He explained something that had never once occurred to me.
Pet bowls sit low, right on the floor. Flies gather right around them, drawn by food and water left sitting out.
So when someone sprays to get rid of the flies, they're spraying exactly where their pet's mouth touches the floor every single day.
"You did what most people do," he said. "The label says use as directed, but for a family with pets, there's no version of 'as directed' that keeps the chemical away from a dog who eats off the floor."
That one sentence stuck with me for days.
I wasn't a bad pet owner. I just never had a way to solve the fly problem without putting something on the ground.