Ticks on Dogs: A Vet's Honest Guide to Prevention, Removal, and Lyme Disease

You get home from a hike, you're peeling off your boots, and your dog flops down on the floor with that happy, worn-out sigh. Then you spot it. A tiny dark speck near their ear, or a bump under your fingers when you go in for a scratch. Your stomach drops a little. Is that a tick? Do I pull it out? Do I need to call the vet right now?

If you've felt that jolt of panic, you're not alone, and this week's video is built for exactly that moment. Kayl took the cameras out to the Westfield Heritage Center, tick country if there ever was one, and sat down with her own veterinarian, Dr. Paula Dupuy, to get the real answers. Not the Google-rabbit-hole version. The version from someone who tests for this every week.

You can watch this week's full video here, but here's what stuck with us most.

What's Actually Hiding in the Grass

Ticks aren't just a Lyme disease delivery system, even though that's the word everyone jumps to. Dr. Paula calls it a "soup of diseases." A tick can be carrying several different infections at once, and some of them haven't even been fully identified yet. That's part of why they're so tricky to deal with, and why "I'll just check my dog every day" isn't the safety net a lot of people think it is.

They live in tall grass, under leaf piles, and along the edges of trails, which describes a huge chunk of Southern Ontario. And here's the part that surprised us: ticks that carry Lyme disease actually survive colder temperatures better than ticks that don't. That means winter isn't the off season anymore. If you're walking your dog through Hamilton's escarpment trails, the Bruce Trail near Ancaster and Dundas, or the conservation areas around Burlington, Guelph, and Cambridge, this is a year-round conversation now, not just a summer one.

The Layers of Protection That Actually Work

Dr. Paula walked through this as layers, not a single silver bullet. Cutting your grass short and sticking to groomed trails is layer one. Topical sprays are layer two, and she was clear that you shouldn't just grab whatever's on the shelf, some of these are toxic to cats and not great for smaller or more sensitive dogs, so ask your vet first. Layer three is a systemic prescription preventative, the kind that kills the tick after it bites. And layer four, for dogs at real risk, is the Lyme vaccine, which works in a way that surprised us: it actually kills the Lyme organism inside the tick itself once the tick feeds.

One myth worth clearing up: tick preventatives don't stop ticks from getting on your dog, and they don't stop them from biting. What they do is kill the tick within about 24 hours of attachment, before it reaches the engorged stage. Since it takes roughly 48 to 72 hours for Lyme to actually transmit, that window matters a lot. It's also why missing a dose by a few days probably won't hurt much, but missing it by a week might.

Checking Your Dog After a Walk Is Harder Than It Sounds

Most ticks end up around the head, ears, neck, chest, and front legs, since that's what pushes through the grass first. Dr. Paula has found them between teeth during dental cleanings and tucked between toes. And the nymph stage, which is the one most likely to be carrying Lyme, is about the size of a poppy seed. You are not going to spot that with your eyes. You're going to feel it with your hands.

If you do find one crawling loose, it's not attached yet and it can't hurt you or your dog. If it's attached, use tweezers or a proper tick removal tool, get in close to the skin, and pull straight up without squeezing the body. Squeezing can push more of whatever it's carrying into your dog.

Lyme Disease Doesn't Look Like What You'd Expect

This was the most eye opening part of the conversation for us. Lyme disease rarely shows up the way an infection "should." It can look like fatigue, a limp, an eye problem, a kidney issue, or nothing obvious at all for a long time. Dr. Paula said she's now diagnosing it several times a week in her practice, and this year in Southern Ontario, somewhere between 1 in 10 and 1 in 15 dogs tested are coming back positive. That's not sick dogs walking into the clinic. That's the general testing population.

A screening test typically runs somewhere between $75 and $125, and catching it early makes treatment noticeably more straightforward. If you're unsure whether your dog needs it, that's a conversation for your veterinarian, not a Google search.

The One Skill That Makes All of This Easier

Here's the part of the video that connects straight back to what we do every day. Dr. Paula pointed out that checking a dog thoroughly for ticks, ears, belly, between the toes, all of it, only works if your dog will actually hold still and let you do it. That's not automatic. It's a trained behaviour, sometimes called handling or husbandry work, and it's one of the most underrated skills a dog can have.

A dog that's calm and cooperative when you're checking them over isn't just easier to live with. It's a dog you can trust at the vet, at the groomer, and on the trail when it actually matters. That kind of reliability doesn't happen by accident. It gets built the same way every other skill in the McCann Method gets built: start easy, reward the right response, and slowly add real-world distractions like the ones you'll find on an actual hike.

This is the approach we take to Life Skills 1. Our program for dogs over four months old. It's not just heel and stay, it's building a dog who's actually reliable out in the world, including when you need them to hold still for sixty seconds so you can check between their toes.

Ticks aren't going anywhere, and honestly, in Ontario they're becoming more of a year round problem, not less. But between the right prevention layers, knowing how to actually check your dog, and a dog who'll let you do it without a wrestling match, you're covering this from every angle.

Happy Training.