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I live in Connecticut. We have a bumper crop of ticks this year. We also have a new BC puppy. Even with chickens combing the yard and woods, it's quite concerning.

Skye is only 9 weeks old and every time out requires constant surveillance. Best solutions for puppy and yard? What strategies are others employing.

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Get a possum - they eat thousands of ticks a week. Don't know how you'd 'rent' one, but if there's a way to encourage them . . . Google them.

 

Guinea hens in particular like ticks, perhaps get a couple of those. Google 'chicken eating ticks' and you'll come up with other tick control ideas.

 

I've seen a suggestion to use a lint roller on yourself after taking a walk, that might help as well. Good luck!

 

Ruth and Gibbs

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I hated to do it, but I broke down 2 years ago and started using Seresto collars because the ticks were so bad and Lyme disease is becoming much more prevalent (I'm in upstate NY) and 2 of my then 3 dogs had gotten Lyme disease.

 

According to the package, the collars can be used on puppies as young as 7 weeks old.

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Recently in Connecticut the Powassan virus has been associated with Ticks. This elevates the concern for Humans, livestock and pets.

 

I'll check out the Seresto collars. Our previous BC, Jade got very sick at only a year old. In spite the Vets concern she pulled through after 3 rounds of antibiotics. Our Home is surrounded by state forest but it is almost off limits due to the infestation level.

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While I am no fan of dosing our animals with chemicals, I find the risk of tick-borne disease (and health issues due to heartworm and other parasites) to justify using whatever I feel is the best option to combat the problem.

 

We've lived here for 25 years. For the first 22 years, we have never had a tick on a person and only two, probably 12 years or so ago, on one dog (she apparently picked them up sticking her face down a woodchuck hole). Never on the cattle or horses. We did have family living very nearby whose roaming intact male dog would bring home American or Brown dog ticks occasionally (they'd find an engorged tick on the floor in their house).

 

Three years ago, we started using the Seresto collar when we travelled south to NC, KY, or VA, where we'd sometimes find one or two ticks on a dog. We'd put the collars on in May and they'd be totally effective through our "southern visiting season" that ended in December. Two years ago, we began finding some ticks on our dogs here at home, Lone Star in the spring and dog ticks in the fall, and sometimes a deer tick. Again, the Seresto collar put an end to that. Last year, we began finding ticks on the cats (they are indoor/outdoor) and the dogs, spring to fall, and the Seresto collars did the trick. This year, we found ticks on dogs in January (while we are considered Mid-Atlantic, we are higher elevation and so have pretty wintery winters) and March, and realize now that we need to collar year-round if we want to avoid ticks on the dogs and cats. I even had a tick on me in March, but this was a very mild winter.

 

A number of factors contribute to the abundance of ticks. The Native Americans periodically burned off the understory in the Eastern woods - that killed lots of ticks and destroyed tick habitat, and that doesn't happen any more. Deer populations in built-up areas are larger than we think, and deer are mobile enough that they help spread ticks. Mild weather has allowed the expansion of the mouse population - the White-footed deer mouse, in particular, is a tick host, especially for the smaller deer ticks and nymphs. It's rather a "perfect storm" for the multiplication and spread of ticks, and the diseases they carry.

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I've always used tick preventive on my dogs. Portugal is an almost mediterranic country, and we DO have ticks. But I used to be able to have a 4/5 months break, between november and may, where the dogs could do without a flea/tick medicine.

 

No more. There's maybe a month or two when, maybe, the dogs could not have the medicine, but it's basically all year round now. Two months ago, suposedly winter, Tess was walking in some fields and getting covered in ticks. And I mean, whenever I looked at her she had half a dozen ticks crawling on her back.

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Grace has had so many ticks I had to give her a topical ointment and that isn't doing what its intended to do but has for the most part cut down on them considerably, its gone from 10 to 2 and none at all for days on end. I am in southern indiana surrounded by the Hoosier National Forest, we have more ticks here than I have ever seen in a season!! I'm alarmed at the number!

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I am with Sue -- I would prefer not to dose my dogs with chemicals every month, but the tick diseases out there are scarier (IMHO) than the side effects of the chemicals.

 

Talk to other dog owners in your area to find out what is working for them. I used to live in NJ and used Advantix Plus. When I moved to VA, Advantix didn't work at all. I kept finding ticks on the dogs and one came down with Lyme disease. I have heard of other similar stories. Currently, Vectra 3D is working for me (in Virginia). The Seresto collar didn't work.

 

In addition to Vectra 3D, when I know that I will be taking a hike through serious tick environment, I will also lightly spray the dogs' chest, belly and legs with a cedar oil solution to help repel ticks from staying on the dog.

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My advice is to use whatever you have to use to keep the ticks off your dogs, because if your dog brings ticks into the house and they fall off him and reproduce inside the house you may end up with a tick infestation in your home. Once you have that it is basically impossible to rid yourself of them without serious application of very toxic chemicals in your home. Been there, done that.

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We had that in Texas - the dogs were boarded for a week at the Army post kennel. When we brought them home, we found them covered in ticks of all sizes. I can still remember sitting in the bathroom, Ed and I and both the dogs, and plucking ticks beyond counting off the dogs. This was in the days before effective spot-ons, etc.

 

Then we took an effective tick powder (something the troops were given to dust their socks, boots, pants, etc., with, and put circles of powder around the walls, furniture legs, etc., to prevent any ticks from climbing off the floor and into drawers, the bed, and so on. We obviously missed one tick because one day, we found a hatch-out of nymphs on our bedroom wall. We promptly took care of them. That tick probably dropped off the day we picked up the dogs and had not yet discovered their hitchhikers.

 

I don't recall us bombing the house with anything (like flea bomb) but we might have.

 

I still get the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it. And those were the days when either ticks transmitted fewer diseases or we simply weren't aware of anything but Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.

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I get the heebie-jeebies just THINKING about ticks.

We generally don't have them here in southeast Utah (lower elevations anyway), but who knows what this year will bring.

I did find one on one of my dogs, after a visit to southwest Colorado. Ugh.

 

Sue - I'm thinking of Seresto collars as well. I did some research on them a year or so ago, and haven't looked since.

But am wondering: how effective do you think they'd be if they were put on for, say, a day or two, and then only put on occasionally? (thinking trips out of home area, maybe a long weekend, maybe longer) Would that work, or do they need to be on 24/7 for anything to actually work? I remember reading that dogs wearing the collars shouldn't be allowed to sleep in your bed. THAT won't work for me! LOL.

Any advice? Appreciate that they are working for you!

Thanks,

diane

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I understand that Seresto collars need to be on for some days to allow the spread of the active ingredients through the skin, so just putting them on and off "as needed" should not be effective. I put them on and leave them on. And Dan sleeps on our bed.

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We use the Soresto collar and it seems to be working really well. We put it on 2 weeks ago and since then, I found two ticks on him, one on his leg and one on his stomach and neither were attached. Without the collar, he would have them under his collar and around his ears. We're going to NC next week where the ticks are horrible (once I went on a walk in the woods with my dad and came back to the house and found 7 ticks on me!) so it will be a real test.

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A foster dog from I-don't-know-where brought the ticks I had into my home years ago, and brought tick fever along with them. I had a very serious infestation for three years. Everything natural that I tried failed to kill them all and the infestation would build back again every time. collars, spot treatments, and all were ineffective. I sometimes pulled 50 ticks off each dog each day. It was a nightmare, and I felt horrible for my dogs.

 

Once, when I found baby ticks on my own bedding, I took all the bedding off the bed and washed it with very hot water, added boiling water and bleach (fortunately the bedding was white), and then put into the dryer on the hottest setting for an hour. when I took the sheets out of the dryer they had live ticks on them. They are that hard to kill.

 

I moved twice during that time. Each time I vacuumed obsessively, inspected everything I was packing, sprayed the contents of the boxes, and bombed the room the boxes were in before I moved them. The ticks moved with me, nevertheless. The thing is, the eggs are too tiny to see and can be literally anywhere, in crevasses too small to find.

 

I had to use toxic sprays which I applied every day for three weeks to get rid of them. Moving all the furniture each time. Fortunately at that time I did not have a cat. You can't use those chemicals if you have a cat; it will kill the cat. I hated doing it, but it was the only thing that worked.

 

Don't let ticks get started breeding in your house, whatever you do. I will never again allow a dog with even one tick on it to come anywhere near my house, not even on my property outside. I am that paranoid about ticks after my experience.

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Seresto are not only toxic should a tick bite the dog once the active ingredient has built up in the skin but it also tends to repel ticks and discourage biting. I've had good experiences so far, here in North-central WV (elevation 1800') and down along coastal plain and coastal NC. I've had the collar on the one dog that goes to Lexington KY with me in May for a week, and haven't found a tick on him, either, and I know there are ticks in that area but perhaps just not where I take him (mostly mowed fields and along roadways).

 

So far, so good, although I've not found it effective on fleas the one time the dogs were exposed to fleas and the collars had been on for about six months or so, so I can't attest to the effectiveness with fleas in my little part of the world. Funny how fleas just don't seem to be such a big deal compared to ticks any more - tick-borne diseases make them so much more worrisome, on top of just being kind of icky.

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I stumbled onto this youtube video explaining Tick Tubes. I'll look into distributing these around the perimeter of the lawn and woods. Very simple, cardboard tubes, cotton balls and permethrin.

 

This will be part one of attaching the tick issue. I'll have to do more research on the puppy herself.

 

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

For anyone interested, I found a great price on the Seresto collars.

 

http://www.miscota.com/dogs/seresto/seresto-antiparasitic-collar-117832

 

This is about $20-25 cheaper than anyplace else I found. Be forewarned though - I ordered mine on May 3 and it shipped on May 5 but hasn't arrived yet. Apparently it was shipped from Barcelona, Spain. I found this out from my credit union, when they red flagged my credit card account due seeing this as a "suspicious looking overseas transaction". :blink:

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The questions about super cheap and coming from overseas, are the worries that they are fake, or real but outdated.

 

I don't buy stuff like this from sources I am not familiar with but you may truly be getting a bargain.

 

Still, let the buyer beware...

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