Scratch and scratch and scratch, shake their head, rub their head on the floor, and a foul odor is released from their ears.

Why are our cats and dogs scratching and behaving in this manner? They have ear mites and there are natural home remedies for cats and dogs as well as medications that can be prescribed by your vet.

You must know these pets are absolutely miserable? Can you imagine what it must be like to have thousands of tiny insects buzzing around in your ears?

These ear mites are parasites. They survive on the body fluids of our pets and they especially love to live in their ears.

As you look into the ears of your cat or your dog, you will see what looks like coffee grounds or the appearance that the ears have a lot of reddish, brownish, blackish granules of dirt.

When I looked into the ears of my dog they looked like black coffee grounds. The skin of the ear was reddish, a bit inflamed and appeared tender.

What you are not able to see with your normal eyesight is the ear mite. Scrape a sample of this waxy buildup and smear it on a dark piece of paper. By looking through a magnifying glass, you will see tiny white points moving. These are the mites.

Do you see yellowish or bluish color to the ear skin of you cat? Do you see a waxy buildup of black coffee like grounds? If you scrape that waxy buildup and place it on a dark sheet of paper and peer through a magnifying glass you will see those white points moving; ear mites.

These little white points or dots represent thousands of ear mites. These mites are contagious to other animals.

Ear mites occur because of poor hygiene and dirty surroundings. We need to keep our pets and their surroundings clean.

Most of us feel that we do keep our pets and their surroundings clean, but they still have problems with ear mite infestation.

There are two other causes; one is your pet contracted the ear mites from another animal or you may have a dog like mine which owns long floppy ears and the interior of their ears provides a favorable environment for ear mites.

Well, between you and me; it will be many months of cleaning our pets, their surroundings, and spraying the environment with insecticides. If there are other pets in the home all will have to be isolated from each other.

If you are not able to control the infection in either the cat or the dog, the end result will be deafness in your pet.

For the dog, wipe ears clean daily. I am currently administering by ear drops a mixture of garlic and olive oil. If the ear is raw and inflamed and no improvement is seen, I will need to make an appointment with the vet to rule out other possibilities.