All About Dog Ticks
Every year when the weather starts getting warmer, dog owners should begin to get concerned about “Rhipicephalus Sanquineus”, commonly referred to as ticks. Ticks are disease-carriers, and can be enough of a danger to infect human beings with illnesses like Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever and paralysis, as well as cause illness and even death in dogs and puppies.
Ticks are shameless little blood-suckers that were responsible for killing countless British war dogs in Singapore in the past, with an microorganism they were carrying. In addition to that, over the course of the Vietnam war, over three hundred American war dogs were killed by tropical canine hemorrhagic syndrome, an illness that is typified by fever and hemorrhaging. Research conducted at the time concluded that, contrary to everyone`s expectations, the common tick was blamed for carrying those diseases to the dogs.
There is more than one subset of ticks, for example the wood tick and the brown dog tick. But they are ticks and are related. Ticks are resistant to insecticide, which makes it difficult to control and eliminate them.
Female ticks lay eggs – huge numbers of eggs. They will lay as many as 5000 eggs in the nooks and crannies of a dog crate or dog house, base board, or underneath the carpets at your house. The eggs are not laid upon the dog or other host animal. After somewhere between 20 and 30 days have passed, the eggs hatch and larvae are released. The larvae then look for a dog to become its host animal, feed on its blood, then release themselves and go off into hiding again. 6 to 23 days after that, the larvae metamorphisize and turn into nymphs with 8 legs. The nymphs then seek out a dog once again (either the same dog or another one), feed on its blood again, then releases itself once more and goes into hiding again. After 12 to 29 days, the tick nymph metamorpisizes into an adult. The adult tick now seeks out a dog host once again, feeds on its blood once again, and then mates. This process is not necessarily a quick one, since ticks can live in your home for up to 2 years without a host animal.
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If the ticks are not inside of a house, they can also exist outside. They can climb onto tree branches and leaves and wait for dogs to pass by and become unwitting host dogs. If your dog takes a nap under a tree or in some bushes, or even simple playing within jumping distance of the parasite, the tick can leech onto the dog. Indoors the ticks will come out from underneath the carpets to reach your dog, or climb walls and tables and chairs, or wherever the tick deems a convenient place to await your dog`s proximity. Ticks can wait as long as six months for a dog to arrive, but the moment the dog arrives the tick knows instantly and jumps to attach itself onto the dog.
When the tick gets onto the dog, it burrows its head under the dog`s skin, sticks out its barbed probe which is kind of like a fish hook shape that keeps the tick from becoming dislodged. When the barbed probe is extended under the skin, the dog can shake or scratch the area all it wants, the tick will not become dislodged.
The adult tick feeds on the host`s blood until it is approximately the size of a pea (quite large if you think about it). A male tick, which is brown in color and much less large than the female tick, then mates with the female tick. She then releases herself from the host dog, and goes off into hiding to lay her thousands of eggs in covert hiding spaces like between the cushions of your couch, or under your carpets.
It is hard to get rid of a tick infestation once it has started in a dog`s kennel or home. But removing a single tick from a dog can be a relatively easy process. The challenge is spotting and identifying the tick before it causes your dog any illness or much pain.