Farm dogs have it rough.
They stay awake all night to keep four-legged varmints out of the henhouse and the two-legged variety away from the bulk fuel tanks.
All winter they sleep outdoors on guard duty, and then when spring comes and they finally get a chance to bask in the sun, the wood ticks come out and make their lives miserable.
Keeping farm dogs completely free of ticks is next to impossible, says veterinarian Sandy Barclay, owner of the Brandon Animal Clinic.
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Removing ticks by hand is a nasty job, and some dogs won’t stand still for it. When a dog is covered snout to tail with the little bloodsuckers, she advises owners to engage in chemical warfare.
Tick collars containing Amitraz and pour-on insecticides can help to keep the tick load down to a reasonable level. Flea and tick shampoos are a good option for immediate effect.
“With tick counts of 15 to 20 a day, I really think that it is worthwhile because they are blood feeders,” Barclay said.
“There are parasites and bacteria that ticks can transmit to dogs.”
Over-the-counter pour-on products found at retailers such as Wal-Mart contain lower concentrations of the active ingredient permethrin because retail stores aren’t allowed to sell higher strength veterinary medicines.
If a dog’s tick problem is bad, then Barclay recommends a pour-on called Defend. It is available only through vet clinics and keeps ticks from biting for up to three weeks per treatment.
“Nothing is a 100 percent effective,” she said.
“You’ll still see them crawling on the dog, but hopefully they will die or fall off before they can feed.”
The insecticide is toxic to cats, however, so caution must be used to prevent them from ingesting it.
“You’d never want to put it directly on a cat or it will cause death.”
This spring, areas of Manitoba and Saskatchewan have reported high wood tick populations.
However, Terry Galloway, an entomologist at the University of Manitoba’s agriculture and food sciences department, said the higher wood tick populations might be occurring only in isolated pockets where ideal conditions exist.
“It depends on where you are. Wood ticks are always very patchy,” Galloway said. “I’ve never seen a consistent response across the province. In some places they’re really high and in others very low. It’s extremely variable.”
The rise and fall of tick numbers depend on the weather and the available number of rodent hosts. An early snowfall also helps the insect survive the winter.
The life cycle of a wood tick has three stages:
- Eggs hatch and release larvae, which seek out a small rodent host for their first meal.
- The larvae become nymphs, which then overwinter in a dormant state.
- The following spring, if they manage to find a second blood meal, typically from a larger mammal such as a dog, deer or human, the nymphs become adults, which require a meal from a third mammal host to provide the fuel for a new batch of up to 10,000 eggs.
“If you have a year in which the number of mice and voles is very low, it might mean that there will be fewer of the juvenile ticks that get successfully fed and don’t develop into adults,” he said.
“They go through the first winter as a larvae and the second as an adult. A lot can go wrong in that time. They have to have decent snow cover fairly early.”
Only deer ticks and western blacklegged ticks have been found to carry Lyme disease. The deer tick has recently been found in parts of eastern Saskatchewan but lives mainly in areas of Manitoba and eastern Canada. The western blacklegged tick lives in parts of British Columbia. On the Prairies, the dog tick followed by Rocky Mountain tick are most common.
