Check Yourself CT, The 2025 Tick Season is Off to a Brutal Start

If this past week is any indication of how the rest of 2025 is going to be, Connecticut is in for a long year of being scared of Lyme disease and ticks.

I walk my dog everyday along the Naugatuck River in Torrington, and the first few sprigs of long grass have just started to fill in along the riverbank. It's only May 5, 2025, today, yet I've already had to remove 4 ticks from my dog over the past few days. We just gave my 6-pound Chihuahua his first dose of K9 Advantix last weekend, but it seems as if it didn't work this week. Unlike the old white flea collar we used to use in the 70's & 80's, the protection K9 Advantix offers is more of a chemical shield that needs a day or so to work through your pet's fur.

The four ticks that I found on RayRay this week were all near the scruff of his neck in the area right behind the ears. They were all very small, not even the size of a grain of rice, luckily I found them all before they had a chance to burrow in and gorge.

I've never removed more than one tick in the space of a week before, four in one week is the new record. In all four cases, I used a pair of tweezers to firmly grasp the tick as close to it's head as possible. I removed each tick slowly, giving it a chance to disengage itself, although I wanted to rip their head off, that would be bad. On the advice of our friend Jen the Zookeeper, I followed up each removal with Neosporin, not alcohol, and now I am super worried about my little fella coming down with Lyme. Beware pet-owners, 2025 may be a bad year for ticks.

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