YOU DON’T WANT TO HAVE TICKS OVER FOR DINNER

People go to great lengths to keep pests out of their home, and for good reason: pests destroy peace and happiness. More importantly, they jeopardise the safety and well-being of all members of your family. It’s hard enough when you can see direct evidence of these intruders, but when they’re small, it becomes an entirely different, exhausting battle. Take the tick, for instance. Most people think that ticks are an outdoor nuisance during warm weather, but, with global warming, ticks are now becoming a year-round threat in Ireland, and they don’t just remain outdoors. They can be carried in on pets or on your clothing / footwear and decide to latch on to you or your pets a short time later. You may not feel them biting as, cleverly, they inject a local anaesthetic first, before inserting their mouthparts in your skin to suck your blood. Ticks are parasites which must consume a blood-meal from a host and they don’t really mind whether that is your pet or you! The tick life cycle can take up to 3 years to complete and, while many don’t, they stack the odds in their favour – an adult female tick can lay up to 4000 eggs! These hatch in the environment and a larva emerges which feeds on small wild animals. These then drop off and moult to the next stage – the nymph, which again attaches to a host for a blood meal. These drop off again before moulting to an adult which is the tick we most commonly see.

Aside from the sheer disgust you may feel from imagining ticks crawling across your floor and up your walls, there is the genuine risk that these ticks can transmit diseases when they are feeding. Sometime after an infected tick latches onto a host and begins to consume a blood meal, it can pass whatever parasites or bacteria it is carrying onto the new host. Infected ticks can transmit more than one disease at a time. Lyme disease is known to be present in ticks in Ireland and there have been reports of people and dogs being infected with this disease from ticks here. They also carry other vector borne diseases such as Anaplasmosis which range from mild to severe.

Although you  might think it’s impossible to protect your dog in places like these, it’s not. There are many  different types of tick-prevention treatments available. The key is to choose the kind that will kill  ticks wherever they try to feed on your dog.