Our Dogs and Ticks | How to Remove Ticks from Dogs Safely

photo: Beth & Mike's Excellent Adventures

A Keep the Tail Wagging follower emailed me last week to share that her fur baby, Pete, was diagnosed with Lime Disease.  I live in Marysville, Washington and ticks and lime disease isn’t something that I’m concerned about in our area, but we are surrounded by woods and we encounter deer regularly, so I have to ask “are our dogs really safe?”  Our vet reminds us each year that it’s important to bring the dogs in if we plan to vacation out of the state, because there are risks in other areas.

Pete’s mom asked that I share information about dogs and ticks and how to remove ticks from dogs so I found an informative video on YouTube and sent out an inquiry asking for help and this is what I learned.  I put the key tips in bold.

Video | How to Remove Ticks from Dogs Safely

Robert B. Butler, Inventor of the TickNipper

Robert is the type of dog owner that I like to meet.  He understood how to remove ticks from dogs safely, but found a way to do it better.  Here is is story…

“I grew up with canines, and since 1990 my family and I have two wonderful dogs, both about 65-pounders. I own 14 acres of woodland proplerty and when we got Spatsy in 1990 she started coming home loaded with ticks. I got out a pair of electrician’s wire cutters and ground down the backs of the jaws so they didn’t quite touch and found that it removed the ticks quite well: I could grip and pull the tick out quickly, and the dog’s hair around the tick would slide thru the plier’s jaws as I pulled the tick away. The next time I took Spatsy to the vet I showed him the tool and his eyes bugged out and he exclaimed, “Your tick remover solves the Lyme spirochete transmission problem!” He said this is because (1) the tool’s long thin jaws don’t squeeze the tick’s body as you pull it out (a tick’s partly engorged body is like an eyedropper and if you squeeze it during removal you inject its contents into the skin) and (2) because the tool pulls the tick out straightly and quickly (the tick should never be rotated during removal nor should you apply any kind of heat or chemicals to induce the tick to remove itself as these methods make the tick inject disease microbes into the host’s skin as it removes itself). So I made a better model of my little pliers, patented it, and have been selling it ever since.”

Please stop by the TickNipper site to see this amazing tool in action!

Scott Cohen, co-author of Petscaping: Training and Landscaping With Your Pet in Mind

“Good landscape maintenance practice is a great way to help control fleas and ticks from ever entering your yard. When weeds and weedy grasses go to seed, it welcomes seed feeding rodents like mice, rats and squirrels into the yard. These rodents are often carriers of fleas, ticks and lyme disease.”

Scott is the co-author of new book Petscaping: Training and Landscaping With Your Pet in Mind, a book is chock full of ideas and tips for sharing your garden with your dog.

Louise Hodges, President, Greenbug, Inc.

Avoiding ticks is the first step and it is best to use natural methods rather than the toxic spot drop treatments that can be worse than the disease. Greenbug for Pets is a green, eco-friendly pest control product that is deadly to ticks and therefore an excellent repellent using cedar as the active ingredient. Cedar – just like cedar chests and closets where you never see a bug – is deadly to pests yet harmless to humans, animals and the environment. Treating to prevent Lyme disease is as simple as a quick and light application every 3 – 4 days to maintain the slightest aroma of cedar to repel the ticks. Lyme Disease is rampant in the Northeast US but found everywhere deer ticks live which is typically wooded areas.

If Lyme disease is present, it is imperative to keep all toxins away from the pet as it can trigger problems in an already compromised immune system. Never use spot drop treatments on pets post Lyme Disease diagnosis as they are highly sensitive to poisons. Spot drop treatments are basically low level poison coursing through the veins of an animals at levels toxic enough to kill pests yet ‘low’ enough to not harm the pet. But poisons is poison and having it run through the vital organs 24/7 is known to shorten pets’ lives by as much as 25%.

PetMD, If the diagnosis is Lyme disease…

Treatment | If the diagnosis is Lyme disease, your dog will be treated as an outpatient, unless its health condition is severe. There are a number of antibiotics from which to choose. It is important that you keep your dog warm and dry, and you will need to control its activity until the clinical signs have improved. The recommended period for treatment is four weeks. Your veterinarian is unlikely to recommend dietary changes. Do not use pain medications unless they have been recommended by your veterinarian.

Unfortunately, symptoms do not always completely resolve in some animals. In fact, long-term joint pain may continue even after the bacteria has been fully eradicated from your dog’s system.

Living and Management | Improvement in sudden (acute) inflammation of the joints caused by Borreliashould be seen within three to five days of antibiotic treatment. If there is no improvement within three to five days, your veterinarian will want to consider a different diagnosis.

Let’s help our fellow dog lovers…

Please share the products you use to prevent ticks, your tips on how to remove ticks from dogs safely, and any tips on living with and treating Lyme Disease.  

Related posts: