The Olympic long-jumper of the animal kingdom!
Our Stuffed Flea
This engaging, realistic-looking stuffed flea is soft and floppy. The legs are made of soft plush fabric allowing for a myriad of postions. The body is light brown. Our flea has a kindly expression and promises not to bite. This flea makes a nice pet, a gift to a dog or cat lover, or to the local veternarian. Check out our other flea toys and gifts.
About Fleas
The word "flea" is a general term referring to any number of small wingless insects in the order Siphonaptera. The flea is a parasite and lives off the blood of mammals and birds. The flea is usually 1/8 inch long, dark brown to red-brown in color, wingless and possessing a tube designed to suck blood from its host. The flea's body is hard, smooth and flat in order to crawl with ease through hair. Its body is tough and adapted to withstand the scratching and biting of the annoyed host. In relation to its size, the flea is the greatest jumper of all living creatures.
The Tag on Our Stuffed Flea Says:
FACTS: The flea's diminutive size has made it a global symbol of insignificance. But as carriers of typhus and tapeworms - not to mention bubonic plague - fleas will not be ignored.
One of the original subjects of microscopic examination (early microscopes were called "flea glasses"), fleas can now boast of nearly 3,000 identified species. The most commonly encountered is the cat flea, Ctenocephalides Felis, but despite its name, it is broad-minded with respect to hosts and will happily affix itself to dogs - as well as their best friends!
If you encounter a flea, thorough vacuuming, twice a day for several weeks, is recommended. A single flea can lay hundreds of eggs, so you don't want to miss any. (And if you do, call for help: professional exterminators should be able to handle the problem.)
Of course, fleas are hardly all-work-and-no-play: they have the noted abilities to jump hundreds of times their own height and carry loads hundreds of times their own weight. These remarkable skills probably account for the creation of circuses designed to highlight other remarkable flea-talents such as playing in an orchestra, dancing, juggling, fencing, and a variety of other diverting activities. So if all else fails, send in the clowns.
This blog is sponsored by Tapir and Friends Animal Store.
