What to do (Tick on Buster)??

georgie4682

Buster goes out into my yard, his walks are in the neighborhood.  He doesn't go into the woods, although further down our hill in the backyard (not our fenced in portion, so Buster has no access to this part of the yard) we get lots of deer and we do have some woodsy areas.

The deer track them in....deer tend to come into yards and eat grass at night. We have a 4ft fence and I've **seen** deer in our yard, they catch my sent and jump the fence. Ticks are attracted to cardon dioxide, and they can hibernate up to 18years(some types) until the carbon dioxide 'wakes' them....They attach to the dogs because the dogs are closer to the ground(laying in the grass and such).

Just be sure to give them flea/tick shampoo bathes, and keep up on your flea/tick control.....I recomend 7-Dust for the yard, it is a pesticide, but my family has been using it from *years* and have never had any problems with it. If you decide to 7-Dust your yard, put the Dust into an old pair of panty-hose. Just shake that a little bit as you walk your yard, then try to keep the dogs out of it for a few hours(I recomend doing it at night, and then in the mourning it *should* be fine).

 Also talk to your vet about the possiblities of Buster contracting Lymes.  I know here ticks are bad but the acutal disease isn't that bad so I've never given the Lymes shot to Maze due to the suggestion of my vet. He didn't see it nessicary.

The head will infect -- you may want to have your vet check it out so he can remove the rest of it.  When they feed is when they spread disease -- so the fact that this was attached and in longer than a few hours, yes - there is a risk of tick disease. 

Thanks everyone for the suggestions.  I guess I will be making that vet appointment today.

deer ticks that carry lymes are tiny; if this thing is big, it's perfectly safe. Just pull it off. If I went to the vet every time we found ticks on dogs we'd practically live there.

http://www.oes.org/html/how_2_identify_different_ticks.html

here, tick identification. It's important to remove ticks as soon as possible so if you find one on your dog yank it immediately. People talk about proper removal technique, infections etc. but I've yanked hundreds of ticks off dogs and horses and never had a problem.

I've found three ticks on Lexi and Luna in the past couple of week. (Makes me wonder if I had a bad batch of Frontline Plus, since they were last Frontlined on 10/10!)

Anyway, if the tick bites, then I have the vet run a blood test three weeks later so we can be sure they haven't picked anything up. If the tick hasn't bitten, we don't do the blood test.

mudpuppy

deer ticks that carry lymes are tiny;

I've had huge deer ticks on my dogs....mainly because most of my dogs have been long-haired and ticks are hard to find in the masses of fur.

if it was huge it wasn't a deer tick. Deer ticks are tiny. It's a species thing- like whales are big and sardines not so much. If it's a big sea-going animal you know it's not a sardine.

OK, so it was big to ME, but is that big in general?  What's big?

georgie4682

OK, so it was big to ME, but is that big in general?  What's big?

Dunno about species but twice a few summer's ago I found a tick on me (crawling, not biting) and it was very very tiny, smaller than half the size of a grain of rice.  I live in Michigan and our deer are out of control so maybe it was deer ticks. 

As far as I know, deer ticks are tiny, like the head of a pin.  If you thought it was a wart initially, it's probably the other kind of tick (not a deer tick).  Those bigger ticks do carry Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.  Deer ticks are the only species that carry Lyme.

Errrr maybe I'm stating the overly-obvious but the "size" of a tick can depend on how long it's fed. 

Now UN-bloated yeah, there's a definite size difference in ticks.  BUT most of them are pretty darned small - maybe the size of a sesame seed but more round and dark brown/black.  BUT that same tick, once it's feeding will swell to the size of your thumb nail - pretty much the size and round-ness of a small red grape. SAME tick.

You almost can't figure out how it CAN swell that big and be as tiny as it is to start with and when they're that size you can't get one 'out' without killing it. 

If you leave the head in it can infect -- but even that isn't a mega deal as Mudpuppy says.