What All Dog Owners Have To Know About Dog Ticks
One of the great joys of dog guardianship is spending time in the great outdoors with your best buddy. The sunshine, the fresh air, sight and sounds – what could be better.
But tread carefully, there’s danger up ahead. No, I’m not talking about bears or snakes or even wolves. I’m referring to ticks!
Ticks are parasitic arachnids, related to spiders and scorpions. These parasites feed on the blood of warm-blooded creatures, and seem to have a particular fondness for dogs. If your dog spends any time outside in the summer months, it’s likely he’ll acquire a tick or two.
These bloodsuckers have an ingenious way of finding a host. They climb up onto a long stalk of grass and wait in ambush for an unsuspecting victim. When your dog walks by, the tick hops on board, attaches itself by its mouth and starts feeding.
They even inject a numbing agent into the wound, so that the dog does not detect their presence. And they are voracious feeders. A tick can suck up to 100 times its own body weight in blood.It’s therefore very important to check your dog for ticks. In fact, this should be part of your grooming regime.
You’ll generally be looking for two types of ticks. The hard-bodied type is normally brown in color and resembles a small round spider. The soft-bodied type is larger and grey in color. They may be flaccid, or distended, depending on how much blood they’ve consumed.
Ticks are a serious threat to your dog’s health, spreading some pretty nasty diseases like Lyme disease. They are also known to attack humans and I should know. I’ve been bitten by a tick and I can assure you, it is very unpleasant, with severe headaches, nausea and pain.So how do you get rid of these leeches? Everyone has a theory but unfortunately few of them work. For the record, avoid burning the tick with cigarettes and matches, or using petroleum jelly, or alcohol.
The right tool for the job is a fine-pointed pair of tweezers. Position the tweezers around the tick’s head, as close to the dog’s skin as you possibly can. Now, grasp the head and pull back gently, giving a slight twist of the wrist as you do. Keep it slow and steady, because you don’t want the head to break off and remain in the wound and become infected.You should also use a hydrocortisone spray on the bite spot to take care of the irritation.
Once the tick is removed place it in a bowl with an undiluted household bleach or ammonia based cleaner. Just flushing it down to toilet won’t kill it, and it may go on to infect another person or animal.
If your dog spends a lot of time in open fields or woodland you should consider using a vet approved preventative like Frontline Plus. This will kill ticks already on the dog and prevent new ones from attaching.
Click here to discover more about dog ticks, dog care, dog breed info and other helpful dog advice at dogsanddogtraining.com
Tags: dog care, dog health, dog ticks, dogs
Leave a Reply