Shelties and Ticks and Lyme Disease

Ticks, not a pleasant subject and shelties and ticks is even less pleasant. Ticks have always creeped me out a bit, I mean they even look a bit evil. What else can you say about little blood sucking critters. YUCH!!

Ticks are actually arachnids, which is the same family that spiders and scorpions belong to. (Nice - little blood sucking spiders.) One of the more infamous of the family is the deer tick, also called the black-legged tick. This tick depends on deer to obtain enough blood to reproduce. It takes a 3 day meal of blood from the deer to allow the adult female to reproduce, laying as many as 2000 eggs.

The reason deer ticks are infamous is because they carry Lyme disease. The name is derived from a town in the Northeastern United States, Lyme Connecticut. But that is not to say that this disease is specific to this part of the world. Unfortunately this problem covers much of the United States, it can also be found in Europe as well as parts of Asia and South America. Although in the US, the risk of the disease is much higher in the northeast as can be seen on this map (provided by Wikipedia).

It is believed that the disease is most often transmitted by the deer tick (other parts of the world have different species that transmit the disease, even in other part of the US) in its nymph stage. Typically you not not feel a tick bite and to make matters more difficult the nymph is so small its hard to find, giving it opportunity to spend the required 24 hours to transmit the disease without being detected. As can be seen in the photo, the female tick is much larger so has a better chance of being found and of course, as a tick feeds it becomes larger.

You can imagine or perhaps you know, how difficult it can be to find a tick on a dog (shelties and ticks become more of an issue because of the shelties thick undercoat), so it really makes sense to take preventative measures. One strategy would be to get your dog a Lyme disease vaccination and the first line of defense would be to protect against tick bites. Plus be sure to check your sheltie (dog) for ticks when potentially exposed. Don't forget to check in their ears!

Lyme disease can be difficult to diagnose because the symptoms are so similar to other disorders. Diagnosis usually starts by examining the dog's history and his exposure to high risk areas. Then in addition, they look for other symptoms characteristic of the disease, such as limping. They may have a fever. It is difficult to diagnose because the disease causing organism is difficult to detect, so as a test only the antibodies can be tested for. The problem here is that the antibodies may be present from minor exposure to the organism or from the antibodies created by the vaccine.

Bottom line though, is that Lyme disease is not nearly as problematic for dogs, as it is for people, if detected early. They respond well to antibiotics, in fact, that is sometimes another aspect of diagnosis, how well a symptomatic dog responds to antibiotics.

So keep your dog tick free, as long as they are not on for more than 12 hours the risk is significantly reduced. If your dog starts to limp for no reason or exhibits other unusual symptoms, get him or her to the vet.

Let's try and keep shelties and ticks from getting acquainted! And if we do find shelties and ticks getting acquainted, that's one relationship we want to nip in the butt, the tick's!

References:

Pictures provided by tickinfo.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lyme_Disease_Risk_Map.gif

http://bakerinstitute.vet.cornell.edu/cahrc/Lyme.htm

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