Controlling Ticks And Fleas

It's once again the season of ticks because we find our dogs with those pests every day. We have a scoreboard of sorts for our 3 dogs. Last Saturday, all 3 dogs were found to have more than 10 ticks each. What we did is to use liquid dishwashing soap. Mixed with gallons of water, the liquid dishwashing soap mixture is applied around the house including the doorways. On the following day, the scoreboard was zero for all our dogs.

Yesterday, there were 1 each and today, as per our housemaid, another 1 each for the score. So it's clear that ticks are deterred by the liquid dishwashing soap. That's also applicable to fleas.

 

Fleas are not much of a problem because they easily go away when the floor is mopped with a "very wet" mophead. We seldom have fleas inside the house. Our nemesis is the ticks that can ruin our day. One thing we noticed with the emergence of the ticks is when we do some gardening. Digging the ground is a sure way to awaken the sleeping ticks - that's our impression because whenever we would till the soil, we would find some ticks in our dogs. The more we dig, the more ticks stick to our dogs. We still cannot establish the connection but it is confirmed.

We are like entomologists who are studying the ticks. In our previous home (the house we rented with a hive of ticks) we used insecticides to clear the interior of the thousands of ticks - no exaggeration, the ticks were in droves. After a year of fumigating the house once in a while, we had our very first dog which we named Jedi. We thought the house was tick-free already but it wasn't. Jedi would get about 5 to 10 ticks a day. As per our investigation, the ticks would climb up the wall and up the ceiling then fall down to the target where our dog was there in the center of the living room. It was our observation, so many times we had seen a tick in the ceiling that would fall down. For a small creature, that behavior is of high intellect.

 

Ticks of course are the main vector for Lyme Disease, a potentially disabling, sometimes life-threatening condition. The ticks carry the bacterium, unaffected by it, and upon burying their heads into the skin, then emitting anticoagulating serum, inject the bacteria, Borrelia burgdorferi, into the blood.

Ticks were a very real problem when we lived in the Missouri Ozarks, due, I guess, to the great variety and numbers of wildlife. Though official literature on ticks denies it vigorously, I claim ticks are able somehow to sense closeness of location to potential sources of blood, through odor, perhaps. Ticks are most often encountered in the field. They attach themselves to clothing, hours later having achieved the long climb up pants legs to reach skin, sometimes. They do not climb trees, as widely rumored. On far too many occasions to be just coincidental, I found a tick on the doorknob of our front door. This meant the little meanie had to climb up 4 feet from ground level, cross the front porch, then climb up the door itself. I believe they sensed living tissue having grasped the doorknob. Many other unusual occurances were experienced with ticks.

Ticks are very tiny. The body is typically the size of a "B-B". After attaching itself to a host (ticks are parasitic blood-sucking pests), the tick may remain there with it's head, which is very tiny, embedded in the skin deep enough to gorge itself on blood, for several days, until it becomes many times it's "empty" size, filled with blood. I have seen them attached to dogs engorged to the size of children's glass marbles. Cats rarely are seen to have a tick attached. They seem to have the ability to reach almost anywhere on their bodies with their mouths. I saw our cat pluck an engaged tick from it's back, using it's tiny front teeth.