Veterinarians warn of seed tick dangers for pets, urge prevention measures

LYNCHBURG, Va. (WSET) — Check your fur babies when they come in from outside. Veterinarians are warning about the dangers of seed ticks and your pets.

Seed ticks are the larval, youngest, stage of a tick and they’re out in force right now. They can be as small as a speck of dirt, and especially hard to spot on a pet.

Dr. Mark Freeman, an Associate Professor in community practice at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, said prevention is key when it comes to keeping your pets safe.

These ticks are tiny. They average anywhere from 0.5-1.5 mm in size. If you convert that to inches, it’s literally 0.06 inches. So, tiny little things,” he said. “The best mechanism for minimizing the ticks and the ticks on the pests is to make sure you’re using a really good tick control product.”

He said if you can, try to use a control product that also works as a repellant. Dr. Freeman said the products not only keep ticks off your pet, but they also kill the ones that do latch on. However, he said there’s no perfect solution.

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“Typically, when these egg sacs hatch out and all these ticks are produced, a single egg sac can contain as many as four thousand ticks,” he said. “If that dog walks through a spot where an egg sac has just hatched out, like I said there can be up to four thousand seed ticks, and there’s not a product anywhere that’s going to keep all of those ticks off of the pet,” Freeman said.

Dr. Freeman said that you can use a flea comb to remove seed ticks on your animals or groom them, but it can be difficult.

Because they are so small, being able to groom the dog using a flea comb, trying to get them off the pet, that is an option but it can be a really daunting task. If you’ve got a black Labrador Retriever, with little tiny seed ticks, finding those things down in that fur can be really challenging,” he said.

Dr. Freeman said preventing tick bites in the first place is the best thing you can do for your furry friend, but if your pet is bitten, you should get them checked out by a vet to make sure they don’t develop a tick-borne illness.

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“Those tick-borne diseases, we see so many of them in this area. Lyme disease is a huge problem in this area. We see Ehrlichia, we see anaplasmosis, we’ve seen Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, even though we’re not supposed to have that here, we still have seen it. Those are all tick-borne illnesses that are transmitted through tick bites,” he said. “All of those diseases unfortunately have the potential to be fatal. They aren’t always and we oftentimes do treat them, and treat them successfully, but there are some cases when we’re not successful with treatment.”

If you think your pet may have a tick-borne illness, it’s important to get help.

With these tick-borne diseases, some of them take weeks to months to actually develop into an active infection. When we test for these diseases, the tests usually tell us there’s been an exposure… whether or not they’re going to develop a disease is a different question,” he said. “As veterinarians that helps us to know what things need to be monitored to say whether or not this dog is starting to show sigs of active infection and do we need to treat.”