Clients often ask me “where did my dog get these ticks?”
Ticks only crawl, they don’t fly or even jump. They hang around on the tip of blade of grass or a leaf, usually on a well-used path.
They have their front claws extended, waiting for a warm body — animal or person — to move by and brush up against the plant and then the tick hooks on.
Ticks can detect an animal’s or human’s breath, body odor, body heat, body moisture, vibrations, and can even recognize a shadow.
Their crablike legs have sticky secretions that help them hold onto the host. This is called “questing.”
Ticks are not insects, they are arachnids like spiders and scorpions. They feed on the blood of their host. They are not picky eaters, and they may feed on mammals, birds and even other insects.
Ticks have a one-piece body with harpoon-like barbs in their mouth that are used to attach to a host for blood meal feeding. Their saliva has an anesthetic so the host cannot usually feel them penetrate the skin. Yuck! Are you still with me?
Ticks are typically found on your dog in crevices and hiding places, such as in your pal’s ears. Check your dog for ticks, especially around its eyes and ears, between its toes, on the bottom of its paws between its foot pads, in its armpits, on its tail, around its anus, on its belly, hind legs and under their collar.
Ticks can carry many tick-borne diseases that can make you and you pal sick. The sooner a tick is removed from your dog, the better.
It takes between three to six hours of tick attachment for your dog to get ehrlichiosis and Rocky Mountain spotted fever but Lyme disease and anaplasmosis need 24 to 48 hours of tick attachment for your pal to become infected.
The safest way to remove a tick from your dog is not to use your bare hands as you may have small cracks in your skin and there is the possibility of disease transfer from the tick to you.
Also, with bare hands you may squeeze the tick, forcing more infectious material from the tick to go into your dog.
There are tick removal tools that work really well. The best are the Tick Tornado, the Tick Stick or the Jotovo tick removal tool. These tools provide safe and pain free tick removal, and all are available on Amazon.
To use these tools, you just spread your pal’s fur and place the prongs on either side of the tick and twist upward. If you don’t have a tool, you can spread your pal’s fur to expose the tick, using fine-point tweezers (not blunt tweezers), grasp the tick as close to the skin as possible and pull straight up with a slow steady motion.
Once you remove the tick, clean the tick bite area with rubbing alcohol and rinse off the tick removal tool or tweezers that you used with alcohol. To kill the tick you have removed, take a sealed bag or container filled with Listerine or rubbing alcohol and submerge the tick.
Please don’t try the old folklore tick removal remedies, such as painting the tick with nail polish remover, covering the tick with Vaseline or heating up the tick.
Vaseline was supposed to suffocate the tick it but it just makes the tick burrow even deeper into the skin. Nail polish remover and heat also cause more harm by making the tick burrow further down, and a match or a lighter can easily burn your pal’s skin and/or singe their fur.
The very best way to prevent and treat your pal for tick infestation are oral medications that get rid of and keep ticks off for one to three months. They are very safe. The topical medications do not work as well as the oral products.
Your veterinarian can help you with Bravecto (one chew every three months) or NexGard, Simparica or Credelio (all of having one chew once a month).
Ticks are gross. They range in size from almost impossible to see with the naked eye to the size of a human fingertip, and there are around 200 tick species in the United States.
Ticks found in Santa Barbara County are the Western blacklegged tick (deer tick), the Pacific Coast tick (winter tick), the American dog tick and the brown dog tick (Rocky Mountain dog tick).
In our area, these ticks may carry anaplasmosis, Lyme disease, Borrelia miyamotoi and Rickettsia to our dogs.
Be sure you treat your dog with oral tick preventatives, and have your veterinarian vaccinate your dog for Lyme disease. Your veterinarian can also remove ticks from your dog.
I hate to admit that ticks are a favorite food source for chickens, turkeys and other ground birds like grouse, so they are a very important link in the food chain. But ticks are always an unwelcome guest for us and our dogs.