My doge is a princess of the relatively high-caliber. She has multiple doggy beds, has free reign of the sofa and despite having more comfortable places to lie down than I do, she will always sleep next to me on the bed. I have no reason to try to make her stop doing this because she is a tiny little thing. However, i draw the line at having blood parasites on the body if you are going to be using the same sitting / sleeping apparatus as I do.
Nadi gets to sit pretty much wherever she wants
Lately, I have been finding a lot of ticks on her and perhaps this has something to do with our new city and the riverwalk that we do every day. I have treated her with the Thai generic equivalent of "Frontline" because they have the same active ingredient. However, lately it seems to have stopped working.
In the past while treated with this Frontline copy, ticks could still get on her because it isn't a force-field, but then they would die if they drank her blood. I looked into why this kills bugs and not your dog and it is actually a pretty gruesome process that attacks the insect's nervous system causing them to die quite slowly and painfully... But they are bugs that drink blood, so F**k em!
This doesn't prevent them from actually biting your dog though, it just prevents them from living there. This raises concern because ticks don't have to hang around for a while to spread the many diseases that they can potentially contain and for reasons I don't understand, this relatively metropolitan area contains more ticks than the jungle environs i used to live in.
source
they are very good at hiding as well
After about a week of pulling at least 2 ticks a day off my doge-buddy, I was getting fed up with this and decided to look at the ol' internets for a solution and I found this product that according to dog owners is the creme de la creme of tick prevention and I'm keeping my fingers crossed on the testimonials being true.
According to their own data (it's made by Bayer, so I presume it is somewhat reliable data) this collar can prevent most ticks from ever getting on your dog and while I doubt that could possibly be true without the aforementioned force-field technology, I am willing to take a leap of faith here. They also claim the active ingredient lasts for 8 months and if that is true, that would be amazing!
It is very light weight and after just a day I don't think that my dog even knows it is on her neck anymore. It is now day 2 and I have not yet found any ticks on her body (daily inspection process that she hates but endures because she gets a treat afterwards.) I am hopeful that this thing actually "does what it says on the tin" especially because it actually did arrive in a tin and I want to be able to use this expression literally.
At nearly $50, this is by far the most expensive weapon I have brought to the table for the war on parasites so lets see what happens after a week or so. As it is meant to prevent the bugs from ever getting on her in the first place, I am hopeful that the online reviews (there were hundreds of them) turn out to be true.
I'll report back
The war on ticks when dealing with your dog is a tough one. Nothing seems to work 100%. I have finally buckled and purchased the most expensive commercially-available product on the market after a week or so of discovering ticks on my dog every single day in the past week or so. I drew the line when while I was in the process of pulling ticks off of her, I actually saw another one crawling across the floor towards her, in my kitchen.
I hope it works!
