It’s time for another brisk round of Full Disclosure. Here goes:
Olive’s been having a party. In her fur. The only guests showing up are revolting, eight-legged, disease-carrying parasites.
More Top Picks Best Kids Study Desks For Homeschool
Yeah, ticks.
It turns out this happens to perfectly nice dogs from good families, our sweet golden retriever among them. No, really. And it’s happening a lot this spring.
Borrellia burgdorferi, the bacterium borne by the little buggers that causes the sometimes-serious Lyme disease, has made a bit of a southern migration in the past few years, Warrenville Grove Animal Hospital reports on its website. Historically a scourge more common in the Midwest’s north woods, it’s been found in a large number of the ticks tested in DuPage County — and about one in 10 dogs screened at the Batavia Road veterinary practice is testing positive for exposure to Lyme disease.
“Many of these dogs have not left DuPage County,” the website cautions. “The number of dogs exposed to Lyme will only increase as the bacterium becomes more widespread in the tick population.”
And it appears it’s had a leg up — maybe even eight legs up — already.
“I feel like we’re seeing them a little bit earlier” than usual, said Amber Kunold, who works at Warrenville Grove.
At Dog Patch Pet & Feed in Naperville, pet owners are coming in with tick issues, too, staff member Jenny Lewin said.
The store sells spot treatments, and a preventive spray that Lewin said she found successful when she and her dog went to Wisconsin earlier this month. But she expects the worst is yet to come.
“It’s not a giant problem, but it will be,” Lewin said. “With all the rain we’ve had, we’re going to be seeing a lot of ticks, fleas and mosquitoes.”
OK then. This isn’t unlike that scourge some of us aren’t able to duck when our kids are in school. You know the one — that note from school bearing the unfortunate news that head lice have turned up on a schoolmate’s noggin, and that if you find one, you’d best clean every nook and cranny of everything you own with scalding water and bleach.
Ick! It’s so, well, unseemly. Gross. And then, combing through your kid’s head, you come across one. And its buddy. Ack!
Alarming? Sure. Revolting? Absolutely. Mortifying? Well, of course. But not life-threatening. And clearly not exclusive to other people’s kids.
So when my husband came into the house last Saturday — his face bearing that grimace I know all too well, his thumb and forefinger (yeah, I know he was supposed to use tweezers) gingerly grasping a tick the size of a Chihuahua, saying he’d just found the hateful thing on Olive’s back — I knew the time had come to act.
Because she’s reacted badly in the past to some of the chemicals used in conventional antipest treatments for dogs, we wound up getting a collar that has good reviews and lacks some of the harsher ingredients. So far so good. If it doesn’t keep working and the party continues, we’ll head to the vet for the big guns.
Yes, I know I yearned for spring, whining pretty much endlessly about it in this space. This year, some crawly things come with the territory, I guess. And truthfully, armed with a little knowledge about what else might come creeping along with it, I’m still ready to embrace it.
But maybe I’ll use tweezers.
Twitter@scarlman