I’m a Bad Dog Parent!

Dogs Don’t Know What is Lurking in the Grass.

I’m failing as a dog parent was my first thought. My second thought was- how do I get that thing off my dog. That thing was a tick that had firmly planted itself just above Willa’s front left leg.

We were snuggled in watching one of our favorite TV shows, Willa sprawled between myself and my husband. My husband was idly stroking Willa, when he jolted up exclaiming “What is that?” Willa will be thirteen in July, and we had lost our twelve year old mutt to cancer last July. Naturally the thought racing through our minds was that it was a lump, that it would be determined to be cancer. We were both relieved and disturbed to discover it was a tick.

Once the “lump” was identified my mind jolted back to an article I had read recently regarding the bad medical advice that was floating around the internet. One of the things cited was that you should not use Vaseline to remove ticks. When reading the article I wasn’t concerned. Now my mind chased itself in circles. For years we had followed what we thought was sound wisdom and had smothered ticks with Vaseline to get them to drop off. Now what were we going to do?

I searched the – you guessed it – the now untrustworthy internet to find out how to remove the tick. One of the first articles I saw was from a surely reliable source – The Humane Society. We followed their guide, found here. Willa is doing great, the tick not so well.

Number one on our to do list today is getting flea and tick repellant for our dogs.