Ticks can be found throughout the US. It is important to understand that not all ticks are the same. There are actually hundreds of species of ticks. Many people are aware that lime disease is transmitted by a tick; however this is one of the many diseases that can infect wild animals as well as dog, cats and people.

One of the things we really have to be concerned about today is that we have seen a very significant increase and expansion of ticks population in North America. And this changes the way we look at parasites control on our pets. There are many places today where it used to be flees or heartworms or hookworms but today it is actually ticks. We need to remember the disease that ticks carry and transmit which are so important to us and potentially even life threatening for your dogs and cats. It has been very well documented that we have seen over the last 15 or 20 years a fairly large expansion of the ranges of many of this ticks and also the density of many of these ticks. There are a lot of reasons for this:

• Increase in wildlife population

• Natural climate fluctuations

• People moving into areas where there are ticks

And there are a lot of other reasons that we are seeing the spread and expansion of teak population in the United States.

The best way to protect your dog or your cat is if it is going outside, is applying to that animal a vet recommended tick product.

One of the questions pet owners often what to know is how these products are killing the ticks. Well, the modern tick products that you can find on the market these days are neurotoxins that are specifically designed to attack the nervous system of the tick. These products affect the tick without affecting in any way our pet. However, pet owners should be careful, some of these products can be used on both cats and dogs and some cannot. A dog specific product applied to a cat could cause that cat problems, because of some of the compounds that are in that product. Remember to talk to a veterinarian to make sure you apply the correct product. A very dog specific product may be highly lethal to cats.

Another important thing you need to know is that ticks only for at most seven days on a cat or dog. In fact, ticks feeding for 10 days or longer is pretty uncommon. So, if your cat has ticks today and you remove those ticks with a product and a couple of weeks later there are more ticks on your cat, those are new ticks, there are not the same ticks.

One part of preventing ticks may be to limit where your pet is going. The brown dog tick is the most common tick found in the urban areas. This tick is a bit different from the other ticks out there. This tick, in all of its life stages, prefers to feed on dogs, and can survive in situations that other types of ticks would die. This is the only tick in the US that can infest homes and it would be very difficult to take these ticks out of the house when this happens. For all the pet owners out there that live in the major urban areas and are seeing tick on their pet, that is often the brown dog tick and you have to be really careful because you don’t want a female tick to fall out of your dog and lay 4000-6000 eggs in your house. So you have to prevent that from happening by putting your dog on a veterinarian recommended product.

This Guest Post is Written by interceptor for dogs.

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