I took my dog out fishing with me the other day.
Came back with a few unwanted vistors
Around 70 :shock:
He gets his monthly Front Line
The little suckers don’t seem to care.
Tick season never ends
Be vigilent
I second that. After going through Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, I will strongly suggest you be vigilant, and have a competant physician. Mine misdiagnosed RMSF twice (even with my pointing out the tick issue) before the ER pegged it in less than 2 minutes. I got to see every resident in the building that day, though. They only get 1 or 2 cases a year around here. At least it wasn’t Lyme disease.
A good way to get rid of them is to coat them with soap, they will back out on their own and you don’t have to pull on them. 
My cousin raised cattle and every once in a while one of the cows would go down. Us kids would have to search for ticks pulling out any we found till finally the cow would just get up. RMSF also sometimes would put the dog down. It didn’t seem to harm the animals but I don’t know what it will do to humans.
Once it is diagnosed, RMSF isn’t that big of a deal. Antibiotics will fix the problem. In my case, it was the 4 days misdiagnosed and untreated after primary symptoms showed up that got a bit ugly.
May and June are the bad months here on the farm in SE Michigan for ticks. I can walk through the fields, especially around brush piles and come into the house with Ticks on me. Straight to the shower, it takes awhile for them to dig in. I can feel them on my neck and able to get them before they do their damage. Same with the dogs, the lower to the ground the dog is the worse the ticks are. My Standard Poodle doesn’t get them as bad as the miniture Schnouzer. Rubber bands around the pants legs and lots of Deet on the clothes still don’t keep them off. After July I really don’t have much problem. They were plentiful this spring but not as large as usual. You get use to them. I am more concerned with mosquito west nile than tick Rocky Mtn. Spooted fever here in Michigan. We have a crow season, they seem to be the main carriers of the West Nile. Alabet at least four or five Michiganders die each year from the West Nile, not to mention horses. Our horses are vacinated each spring. I suppose it could be worse, at least we don’t have people running into the stock yards with bombs strapped to them selves. As a farmer we deal with it and put up with it, no grumbles here.
Jonezee,
I was recently in SE OR. talking to a rancher and he said sometimes the ticks are so bad that a foal can have so many that they " suck it dry" and they lose the foal…to me amazing.
I find that hard to belive…were talking lots of blood in a 100 lb foal. More than likely they are suffering from other maladies…lack of salt, lack of proper mothers milk, sunstroke, poor water or none at all, a merid of things. I have only had 5 foals born here on our farm. They got treated better than me. There is a differance between a rancher and a farmer. I have a small farm…some ranchers can’t cover there range in a month. A lot can happen in that time. Nothing would surprise me however.