How Ticks Reproduce on a Dog

"Hello, I’m Dr. Greg McDonald and we are here to talk for Expert Village.com. We are talking about the life cycle of a tick today. People often see a tick on their dog or cat and not know how they got them or what is going to happen as far as a life cycle is concerned. With dogs and cats both, we wind up walking your dog through an area where there are ticks that are ready to attach to a dog and that are a certain life cycle stage. They are standing on the end of plants and they have their little feelers and they grab onto the dogs hair and they always go up towards the neck area of the dog and that is why I do think that good tick collars will actually help you prevent ticks from attaching to your dog. Where I am not a very big believer in flea collars for dogs and cats, I don’t think they work very well because the fleas can actually travel all over the whole dog or cat. So these ticks go up and they attach actually. They attach right onto the dog or the cat and they are going to hang on for a period of about 3 days. When they are doing that they are actually engorged and they also meet up with their mate at that time and they are making eggs so that those eggs can drop off and complete the life cycle. In that life cycle, they also wind up getting into a larval stage and the other animals need to be the secondary hosts for that and depending on the difference species of the tick, this host can be different. So we have dog ticks, deer ticks and rodent ticks and there is all kind of different life cycles. One of the species has a different host for its life cycle so in this intermediate host, other eggs come out and the larvae hatch and those larvae again complete the cycle, climb up onto a material and reattach to a dog or cat as they walk by. We are going to talk about a lot of products that can be used and how to remove a tick once it does become attached to your dog."