Seed ticks
Patti Johnston
7 years ago
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ticks!!
Comments (7)We rarely find a tick just going out into our yard but we're mostly surrounded by hay fields. If I work along the edge of the field where there's brush, I have to use Off. My daughter went to a friend's house down the road and came home with several ticks attached. They have a wooded area surrounding their yard like you do and have their yard treated occasionally. I don't know how often they have it done but apparently not enough. I wouldn't want to use chemicals myself if there were another option. I've heard of some people getting guineas to eat the ticks but I don't know how well it would work or how much trouble it would be. I guess you would let them out during the day and shut them up at night like you do with chickens. Here is a link that might be useful: Gardenweb search on guineas and ticks...See MoreHelp with ticks
Comments (12)***GROSS ALERT*** Do not read this post if you're easily sickened. Ticks are pure evil. I lived in an area where ticks were EVERYWHERE. We're healthy, outdoorsy people--we garden, we hike, and in decent weather, we're out more than in--and we were always getting bitten. I don't like using bug sprays or repellents, so most of the time, we were out there in tick country unprotected. Two people in my immediate family have suffered from tick-borne illnesses; my daughter had Lyme's Disease (caught early because of the textbook "bullseye" around the site) before she turned four years old, and I had Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever (NOT caught early because I thought I had the flu--this was very, very bad--the disease is fatal when untreated, and I was very close to DEAD before I was literally carried into the ER, semi-conscious; they first thought I had spinal meningitis!). My friend's little boy got into a bunch of "seed ticks" and he looked like he was covered in pepper. It took hours to get them all off. And all throughout this time, I was using Topspot and Frontline on my dogs, who rarely, if ever, had ticks. Our neighbor's dog, a working cattle dog, adopted us when he was off-duty. He lived right next door and had the same stomping grounds as my dogs, and he was constantly COVERED in ticks which were swollen up like olive-gray grapes. Every night, my husband would sit with this dog and try to help by pulling the ticks off, and my daughters would try to groom him sometimes, too. One afternoon, my daughters came running into the house, freaking out, and the littlest (about four at the time) was covered with blood on her hands and face. They were both yelling at once, and of course my first instinct was to grab a cloth and start wiping to find the site of the injury. I wasn't finding the source of the wound, and finally they calmed down enough to explain that she'd "popped" a tick when removing it from the neighbor's dog. After that, I wished we could put Frontline on the neighbors dog and on ourselves! The moral of this story: I still don't like using chemicals, sprays and repellents, but *sometimes* it's better than the alternative....See MoreNeed help real fast!
Comments (23)How big are these ticks, and how many are there? I would get those ticks off as fast as I could--shaving the dog if necessary, so I could see them and get at them. Ask the vet about the wisdom of doing that. They can be killers, depending on how many there are of them and the dog's condition. In Japan, about 15 years ago, we had a dog with long thick fur who got infested with teensy ticks--hundreds--maybe thousands of them--and we never knew it until too late, and she died. She was a 6-year-old, very healthy dog, but began to have convulsions once in a while. At first a vet thought she had epilepsy, then that she had kidney damage from being poisoned. But where we lived, it was impossible for her to have been poisoned. It was a bad year for dog ticks, and we didn't know that there could be hundreds of them lurking on the underside of a leaf of grass, even. And they were so tiny that even if one got on your hand, you wouldn't know it was a live creature until you saw it moving. The last time I took our dog to the vet, I noticed lots of small ticks on the floor of his waiting room. They had gorged on her blood and fallen off, and now they were big enough to see--like pepper grains. She died that day on the way home in our car. The vet denied that the ticks could have been responsible, but later I read that each tick has a tiny amount of venom, so it is my opinion that the venom from the bites of thousands of tiny ticks could have poisoned her. It infuriated me some weeks later to hear the same vet telling another pet owner that ticks could poison their dog. He never admitted it to me, but I feel sure I was the one who gave him the idea. If I had known then what I learned from Pepper's death, I would have clipped her and shaved her all over and made sure of getting rid of as many ticks as possible. But we didn't know ticks could be so small, having always seen only medium to large ones on her that she would pick up on a walk, and it was easy enough to pick them off. Before we got another dog that year, we got a device that burned weeds and burned all the dirt in our yard, while I took white rags and wiped under every plant leaf that had suspicious fuzzy brown stuff (infant ticks) clinging to its tip. Then I would get them off the cloth using duct tape or else burn it. I would vacuum and use sticky tape and do anything possible to get rid of any ticks in the house. They probably won't drop off the puppy until they have finished their meal, so your friends has a few days' leeway. Of course, it was dog ticks in Japan that I had that experience with, and the ones on your friend's dog may be a different kind. Sorry for the horror story, but I hope it may help someone else. I hope your friend's puppy does well. Pepper:...See MoreIf this keeps up, we'll be opening a kennel....2 pix
Comments (34)What a pretty girl Wallis is...I couldn't turn that face away either. I can't imagine tossing an animal out like that...how awful. I love the name Wallis too....I need to remember that name for the next pet I get too! Deb...See Morechickencoupe
7 years ago
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