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The best in health, wellness, and positive training from America’s leading dog experts

Home Health Ticks

Ticks

Tick paralysis in dogs is caused by a neurotoxin injected by a feeding tick.

Tick Paralysis In Dogs

Tick paralysis starts five to nine days after the tick attaches and feeds. If the ticks transmitting the neurotoxin are not removed, your dog will eventually die due to respiratory failure.
A golden retriever moves through high vegetation.

What Is Anaplasmosis in Dogs?

Anaplasmosis is a tick-borne bacterial disease in dogs. Signs of an anaplasmosis infection usually occur during the first couple of weeks after infection and are usually mild.
close up of tick on dog

What do Ticks Look Like on Dogs?

Knowing how to identify tick bites, and properly treat them is an important part of caring for your dog and preventing tick transmitted diseases and other health issues.
How to Remove a Tick from a Dog

How to Remove a Tick from a Dog

It’s a good idea to check your dog carefully for ticks after every outing. You may find loose ticks crawling through your dog’s coat....

How to Get the Tick Out

It’s creepy enough that there are billions of these tiny insects living in the woods and fields, just waiting to latch onto your dog...

5 Steps to Safely Pull A Tick Off Your Dog

It's hard to say which is worse: running your hand over your dog and brushing against an attached tick, or seeing a tick skitter across your dog's face. Either way, the unwelcome arachnid must go. What should you do?

Advice for Tick Removal

Is it my imagination, or is a plague of ticks currently in effect? Everywhere I go with my dogs these days, they come back crawling with ticks. I use Frontline on them, though I've used Advantix in the past – as well as apple cider vinegar rinses and essential oil sprays and Skin-So-Soft wipedowns. For whatever reason, Frontline seems to work better than anything else on my dogs, in my area, though I hear contrary reports from other dog owners in other places. I'm seriously considering making a line of Tyvek canine coveralls, instead.

Essential Oil Tick Repellents: What Works and What Doesn’t

Far be it from us to tell you to put pesticides on your dog. But we’ve never heard of a single nontoxic preparation that was effective at keeping ticks off all dogs. For some dogs, only the potent pesticides seem to keep ticks away. There are, however, some nontoxic products – both commercially produced and homemade formulas – that work to repel ticks well enough to consider using them as part of a comprehensive Lyme disease prevention program.

Tick Paralysis: What to Do if Your Dog Seems Paralyzed

Tick paralysis is caused by a neurotoxin produced by egg-engorged female ticks, who transmit the toxin from their salivary glands to the dog during feeding. The production (and transmission) of the toxin is greatest when the tick has been attached to and feeding from the dog between five and seven days. Five species of North American ticks produce the neurotoxin: the blacklegged tick (a.k.a. the deer tick), American dog tick, Rocky Mountain wood tick, the Lone Star tick, and the Gulf Coast tick. Most North American cases occur between April and June, when the ticks are at their peak reproductive activity.

New Flea and Tick Products Hit the Market

Lately, it seems like new flea and tick control products have been popping up left and right. I suspect this is due to some of the original patents running out. When a patent expires, other companies can create generic versions of the same product, usually for less money. This inspires the original companies to create new products that they can patent anew. In some cases, new products are introduced because fleas and ticks may be developing resistance to the older products, lowering their efficacy. Most new products, including all those introduced this year, are just new combinations of older ingredients. Here’s a rundown on these new options.

New Lyme Disease Test for Dogs

Researchers at Cornell University's Animal Health Diagnostic Center have developed a new test for Lyme disease in dogs. Available as of June 15, the Lyme multiplex assay is capable of distinguishing between infection and vaccination when vaccination history is available, and between early and chronic disease stages, from a single blood sample. Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria that cause Lyme disease, migrate by way of the tissues to the joints, nervous system, and organs, causing fever, pain, lameness, and sometimes kidney failure (Lyme nephropathy). By the time these clinical signs show up, the infection may have been present 6 to 8 weeks or longer.

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Assessing Frailty in Dogs

If we’re lucky, our dogs live a long, healthy life and, when their bodies wear out, they close their eyes and make that journey to the bottom of the Rainbow Bridge. Unfortunately, a simple death like that is rarely the case leaving owners judging quality of life.