How our bed bug detection dogs can help you to sleep easy at night
The worst thing about bed bugs for many of our Trust K9 customers is the psychological affect that you are sharing your bed with unwelcome guests.
This can lead to sleepless nights as even the slightest movement on your skin can set your mind racing and there goes your restful night’s sleep. Just the thought of the bed bugs can makes you feel that there is something crawling on your skin (this happens to almost everyone and even talking about creepy crawlies can bring this on). However, in extreme cases this can lead to a condition called “delusional parasitosis”.
Sometimes these types of thoughts can lead people to believe they are still suffering from bed bug bites, long after the bed bugs have died. You might start to convince yourself that you are seeing signs of bugs everywhere and in once case I heard of, a customer rubbed surgical spirits all over their skin to “kill” the bugs. Putting any type of irritant directly on your skin is high unadvisable as this can cause severe dermatitis which is even more unpleasant than the original Bedbug bites.
This is where our specially trained Trust K9 bed bug sniffer dogs can come to the rescue!
Two recent cases give great examples of the calming effect that our team of super sniffer dogs can have; firstly a customer called us in to treat his house having had a bed bug problem for nearly a year having tried several other companies. Having carried out a visual search it was determined that a Trust K9 heat treatment was the most suitable course of action. A few weeks after the treatment he contacted us saying that he thought that he was seeing signs again, so back I went, this time with Alfie the super bed bug sniffing Spaniel and after a thorough search of his whole property Alfie drew a blank.
The relief on my customers face was a treat to behold and now over two months later he is still clear of bugs and he is sleeping easy, thanks to the confirmation of a successful treatment that only a dog can give.
My Second example is of a lady who after another sleep deprived night was starting to panic, she had been staying at her boyfriends and he had had a confirmed infestation (as it turns out we have since treated him). She was due to visit her parents in Norway and was therefore doubly paranoid about bringing them home to her shared flat in North London as well as taking them back to Norway (where a search there can cost over £2000). We gave her flat a good going over with the dogs and again we were happy to tell here her flat was clear of bed bugs and she was safe to enjoy her visit back home in Norway.
The reason we can give this kind of reassurance is the high standard our canine bed bug sniffer dogs are trained to, being able to alert on just one viable egg or bed bug. Trust K9’s bed bug dogs can differentiate between live and dead bed bugs meaning that after a treatment we can tell a customer with a great degree of accuracy if the treatment has been successful or not.
So how can our dogs help you sleep at night?… Easy! they can let you know you are sleeping alone, or not!
Till next time, Sleep tight.
Pete