Santa Barbara — a storybook land featuring year-round mild weather, stunning ocean vistas, meandering creek-side walking trails, and oak-studded foothills.

Alas, humans are not the only creatures that love living in this coastal paradise. We share our natural spaces with a growing number of fleas, ticks, mosquitos and other delightful ectoparasites.

Ticks are a growing concern for dog owners in Santa Barbara County. Popular dog-walking areas like More Mesa, Ellwood Bluffs, and Douglas Family Preserve have especially abundant tick populations.

The Mosquito and Vector Management District of Santa Barbara County staff once collected more than 120 ticks from just the first quarter-mile of the Cold Springs Trail.

Tucker’s Grove and Parma Park also carry tick advisories, particularly in the grassy meadows and canyon trails.

Ticks are active year-round in our area (thanks to our excellent weather), with springtime bringing an increased activity of the young nymph-stage ticks, and the adult forms being more active in the fall and winter.

Dogs and humans are exposed to ticks when they walk through tick-infested environments. 

The teeny nymphs (roughly the size of a poppyseed) are found in oak woodlands or other shaded areas, in the understory — on tree trunks, branches, in the leaf litter.

They are extremely difficult to see and more likely than adults to spread disease. Adult-form ticks are found on the tips of tall grasses, chaparral and shrubs, often along trails where deer or humans might brush against them.

This process (waiting while holding their arms out in hopes of catching a ride on a blood-meal host) is called “questing,” which is an adorable name for a very not-adorable creature.

Common ticks in California are the Western blacklegged tick (Ixodes pacificus), Pacific Coast tick (Dermacentor occidentalis), American dog tick (Dermacentor similis), and Brown dog tick (Rhipicephalus sanguineus).

Three diseases account for most of the tick-borne risk to local dogs: Lyme disease, ehrlichiosis, and anaplasmosis.

Lyme Disease

Lyme Disease is locally spread by the western black-legged tick (Ixodes pacificus). This tick can carry the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, which can lead to Lyme disease.

It takes 24-48 hours for a feeding tick to spread the disease to dogs.

Note that Lyme disease is much less prevalent here than in the East Coast. The reason for this is that the nymph stage of our western Ixodes species prefers to feed on reptiles, which have natural anti-Borrelia factors that kill the Lyme organism.

So next time you see a little lizard doing push-ups in the sun, you can thank them for their service.

Another interesting fact: Dogs are much less susceptible than humans to Lyme disease. After exposure to Borrelia, 90% of humans will go on to develop symptoms, while this is only true for 5% of dogs.

Symptoms of Lyme disease in dogs, should they occur, will be noted weeks to months after exposure. These symptoms usually include fever, joint pain or lameness, and even more rarely, kidney damage.

The good news is that 95% of our beloved canine friends will develop no symptoms at all.

Ehrlichiosis

Ehrlichiosis is spread by the brown dog tick (Rhipicephalus sanguineus). Unlike the black-legged tick, this one thrives indoors, in homes, kennels and shelters, as well as outdoors in warm, dry spots, making it a concern even for dogs that don’t spend much time on trails.

Canine Ehrlichiosis is caused by bacteria (most often Ehrlichia canis, although other species of these bacteria exist) that infect white blood cells.

This is a world-wide disease but wasn’t recognized until the Vietnam war, when large numbers of German Shepherd military dogs began dying of a mysterious illness that caused nosebleeds, fevers, and wiped out their white blood cells.

Eventually, scientists realized the same disease existed here in the U.S. all along, and that it affected humans as well.

In dogs, ehrlichiosis develops in phases. There is an acute phase, characterized by lethargy, fever, loss of appetite, and sometimes enlarged lymph nodes.

Labwork will often reveal a drop in the platelet count. Dogs will typically then recover and enter the next phase (sequestering the organism in their spleen) for months or even years.

In a chronic phase, symptoms can re-emerge including platelet drops, abnormal bleeding, kidney damage and uveitis (inflammation in the eyes). There are treatment options, usually involving an antibiotic called doxycycline.

An interesting note about ehrlichiosis is that many dogs will test positive on their routine screening antibody tests for months or even years after exposure. This does not mean they have an infection that needs to be treated, but does indicate they were exposed to an infected tick.

At our clinic, we recommend dogs be tested yearly, using a screening test called IDEXX 4Dx that tests for antibodies for Ehrlichia, Anaplasma, Lyme as well as Heartworm disease.

We do sometimes have perfectly healthy dogs come up positive, which means it’s time to re-evaluate that dog’s tick prevention medications.

Anaplasmosis

Anaplasmosis is spread by the same western black-legged tick (Ixodes pacificus) that carries Lyme disease, so it shares that tick’s habitat and seasonal pattern.

This is the fastest-growing tick-borne threat in California right now. The share of California dogs testing positive for anaplasmosis exposure has tripled over the past five years.

Santa Barbara County is specifically named among the highest-risk counties in the state, alongside San Diego, Imperial, and Kern counties. Experts point to climate-driven range expansion of the black-legged tick as a key factor.

Clinical symptoms can vary, and may include loss of appetite, lethargy, fever, sore joints/lameness, nosebleeds, or bruising on gums or skin (due to abnormal clotting), and weight loss.

Treatment, again, is often a course of doxycycline.

The good news is, many dogs exposed to Anaplasma don’t develop any signs of infection at all, although they may test positive (on the 4Dx yearly screening) for years afterwards, due to persistent antibodies.

Preventing tick-borne diseases

There are measures you can take to prevent exposure to ticks and tick-borne diseases. 

  • Use a veterinarian-recommended, year-round tick preventive, even in the cooler months, since adult black-legged ticks stay active through fall and winter here. At our clinic, we usually recommend oral flea/tick products like monthly Nexgard, Simparica, or Bravecto. There are also topical products like Vectra 3D, and an 8-month collar called Seresto.
  • Stick to the center of trails and avoid brushing against tall grass, especially on known hotspots like More Mesa, Ellwood Bluffs, Douglas Family Preserve, Cold Springs Trail, and the canyon trails at Tucker’s Grove and Parma Park.

An added bonus, this should help prevent exposure to poison oak as well.   

  • Closely examine your dog thoroughly after any hike or playtime in grassy or brushy areas. Pay special attention to the skin around the ears, eyes, neck, armpits, groin, tail, between toes, and under the collar.
  • Remove any attached tick promptly; ticks generally need time attached (often 12-24 hours but varies by disease) before they can transmit disease. The sooner you find and remove a tick, the better. Do not wait for your veterinarian to remove it.

To remove a tick, use clean tweezers to grasp the tick near its mouthparts/point of attachment. Pull straight up, there is no need to twist.

If mouth parts are left in the skin and cannot be removed, they will be naturally ejected during the healing process.

Dispose of the tick in alcohol, in a sealed bag, or flush down the toilet. Do not crush the tick, especially with bare hands. Wash the site of the tick-bite (and your hands) with soap and water afterwards.

Keep kennel, shelter, or indoor environments clean, since the brown dog tick can establish itself indoors year-round.

There are no vaccines for Canine Ehrlichiosis or Anaplasmosis. There are Lyme vaccines available, but given the low incidence of dogs presenting with symptomatic disease in Santa Barbara County, this vaccine is not routinely recommended in our area. 

However, with proper attention to clothing, hiking etiquette, and tick-preventative medications, you and your dog should enjoy our beautiful outdoors safely.

For some fun interactive graphics depicting the prevalence of tick-borne, heartworm, and other diseases in pets of California (you can choose to zoom in on Santa Barbara County specifically).

I recommend that you check out this very informative website https://capcvet.org/maps/#/.

I also recommend the following websites:

Dr. Hilary Quinn is a small animal veterinarian in Santa Barbara. She owns and operates Wilder Animal Hospital, and shares her own home with three humans (her husband and two kids) as well as two rowdy dogs, a very calm kitty, two fish, and six chickens. Contact her at news@noozhawk.com.