[ Foreword: I think
@OffgridK9lover ,
@Keepinitlowkey and maybe even
@Bloodwolf and
@UR20Z need to see this post, as well as a slew of other friendly faces from the toxic masculinity thread, and homesteaders in general. Because I know the CO2 traps and flamethrower build part, middle-to-bottom, is gonna tickle 'em just right
]
I'd had this exact same concern for a number of years about using spot-ons or oral tablets: "I don't want to dump chemicals on my dogs that poison their blood". Also, like you, my next fear was "What if its present in the semen or vaginal secretions that I enjoy consuming?"
But 2022 hit my farm hard in a number of ways, and I had to embrace some modern chemical warfare in addition to old-fashioned
fire. And I'm talking controlled burns with diesel there. I literally built a flamethrower out of a retrofitted backpack tank sprayer, a Harbor Freight torch head kit, and 4 gallons of diesel at a time. More on that later. Sadly, I lost a lot in '22, but I'll spare you the detail. Among last year's hardships was a dark period I've come to refer to as 'The Tick War'. From that ordeal, I've learned a lot about them, and I'm happy to share with y'all.
One of the first things to understand about spot-ons and tablets is that they do not, in fact, poison the blood. Likewise, the tick is not 'poisoned' by taking a blood meal from the dosed animal. Instead, via a process called dermal translocation, the insecticide compounds spread from the shoulder / tailhead application site to become present on the skin's surface over time, being secreted by the dog's sebum (oil) glands. Translocation and establishment into the sebum takes about 15-30 days after administration although some products (and some dogs) will show results sooner, ie. you may observe adult ticks dropping off as early as week 1. This is why dosing schedule (frequency) becomes important -- so that you don't run the sebum gland's storage dry of the meds and have to start (wait) for the cycle to restart. The ticks then come in contact with the insecticide compound as they crawl on the body against that skin, and again when they (incidentally) ingest it as they pierce the skin for a blood meal. Also noteworthy, is to get as much product as possible onto the
skin, not the fur. Translocation only works for what contacts the skin -- any liquid up on the fur is wasted. If you have a heavy-coated breed, clip or shave a spot of the fur out where you apply. Do what you must to make it down to skin.
As for mode of action, all the prominent compounds, from spot-ons like permethrin to fipronil, all the way up to the RX oral chews like afoxolaner, fluralaner and sarolaner, and even over to the non-pet stuff like cans of Raid for wasps/hornets, nearly all of these are neurotoxins of one order or another. They basically make the targeted insect lose CNS control, resulting in anything from seizures & spasms, to paralysis. It is believed that they ONLY affect the nervous system of insects, not higher animals. The compounds acutely disrupt the insect's normal activity, eg. feeding, reproduction, or bodily control, so that they'll drop off the dog and die soon after. Some have quicker knockdown than others, so it could be minutes or days depending on what product we're talking about. I'd have to dig in my notes, but iirc, it is believed that any trace amounts (<1%) actually entering the dog's blood are trivial, ineffective against a higher animal's CNS, and are easily filtered out by liver, spleen etc., to be passed out in urine like any other inert foreign matter.
Background: I own a small homestead, mostly wooded. I'd say about 2/3rds of my acreage is old-growth mature dense woods. My dog pack stands at 6. All of mine are large breeds with varying coat thicknesses, from pit bull to GSD to Pyrenees/St Bernard. Ticks are easy to pick off a pit, impossible on the pyr/saint, and somewhere in the middle for the rest. I also have hogs and a donkey, and at the time of the Tick War, I had cattle too. My hog pen and some of the auxiliary animal pens are in those woods, so yeah, you can imagine 'tick' is a real four letter word around here. For a few years, I would strap on a 4 gallon sprayer and spend a few solid days covering 7200+ sqft of pens and perimeter with pesticide, because I didn't want to put anything on the dogs. Broke my damn back trying to keep this place sprayed and keep the animals untainted by chemicals. I sprayed a mix of permethrin for the adulticide component, with Nyguard in the tank for an IGR (Insect Growth Regulator, synthetic hormone that breaks the life cycle in earlier stages, egg -> nymph).
For the early years, it worked great on fleas, eradicated them entirely. Been 100% flea-free a few good years now. For awhile it worked on ticks too. But by 2022 it was failing on the latter. Fleas are frail; ticks are much heartier. My hypothesis is that I'd unwittingly created a wave of permethrin-resistent ticks. Unlike a pest control professional, I didn't understand the importance of rotating chemicals so that the targeted pests don't develop resistance! By spring of '22 the problem kept getting worse until my animals were covered in ticks. They spread
everywhere on this farm, rapidly. A few animals came down with Lyme. They were on me, in the home, in the bed, everywhere. I couldn't even pay pest control to come out and deal with it -- they wouldn't take the job, said the acreage is too many sqft to cover.
Left to my own devices, to come to my own rescue as usual, this is where I got both medieval
and scientific. In the early efforts at combating this, I bought all the chemicals I could lay hands on. Cleared the shelves. Plus various volume/bulk orders from DoMyOwn (in TX, you don't need a pest control license to buy the same chemicals in the same concentrations the pros use). Wettable powders, broadcast sprays, you name it, I had it all. But egg nests were still hatching, birthing new waves of tiny red seed ticks that swarmed my animals, draining blood. They were too tiny to pick off at this life stage and the adults were forming a damn
crust lapped over ears, eyes, muzzles, between toes, underarms, etc. It got disgusting and horrible, quick. Baths, dips, and me picking off by hand into jars of my homemade tick brine were only triaging it, not resolving it.
I took hiatus from my then-job and went to war. With all the chemicals arrived and inventoried, I setup a makeshift lab in the hog barn. On bucket lids, I laid napkins impregnated with various insecticides & IGRs at different mixing concentrations. I collected live samples of ticks off the dogs and deposited them on the napkins, wrapping and trapping them in contact with the chemicals. I kept a detailed log book, observing motility, and noted how long it took each to die.
The short end of my lab experiment results?
Nothing worked. What little did work, wasn't working fast enough (taking days, not hours) and wasn't even getting me a complete 100% kill anyway, even after a full week one! That included the most expensive chemicals the pros use -- even these were still leaving too many ticks alive! This is where my permethrin-resistence theory evolved, since nearly everything you buy is pyrethroid-based. I needed their survival rate at 0% and pesticides weren't getting me there.
Out of time and money, with a back breaking from innumerable gallons strapped to me and weeks of spraying to no avail, with no exterminator calvary coming and no new chemical avenues to try, I fell back on something old-fashioned nobody thought would work... and it worked
beautifully. What was this miracle solution? Fire. And ice. I was about to setup coops for ongoing guinea predators too, but as it turns out I didn't need to.
See, ticks are attracted to CO2. All of their host animals exhale it including humans, so ticks evolved to follow our CO2 trails. Not gifted with flight, nor ground-jumping capability like fleas, they can only travel by "questing", which is to climb up anything available (fences, trees and other vegetation etc), swing their bodies out, stretch their free legs, and wait. They wait for a host to brush past them so they can hitch a ride and take a blood meal. When the females are full, they drop off, molt to the next life stage, re-quest, re-feed on blood, then drop a final time to lay eggs. It is this CO2 tracking and questing behavior that you can
exploit the fuck out of, to kill the motherfuckers.
How? Here's your shopping list: a few blocks of dry ice, equivalent number of cheap 'soft-shell' styrofoam coolers, a jerry can of diesel, a backpack tank sprayer with
full metal wand and aerator tip set to spray a broad, coarse
mist not narrow jet stream. Plus a torch head kit from Harbor Freight, the one in the welding aisle that has a few feet of hose and an assortment of flame heads. Drill holes in the coolers and lay the dry ice blocks in them. Now you've got a handy portable tick trap: the dry ice coolers will give off CO2 thru the bored holes as it sublimates (melts). The CO2 clouds will draw and collect ticks en masse overnight. Set your traps next to something tall, straight, and fire-retardant like a wire fence, or in a copse of mature trees with brush, ornamentals or some other vegetation you don't care about. Metal mesh fences are best eg. woven wire, chain link or barb -- you're gonna want that fire retardency for what comes next. Because what comes next is revenge. And revenge on ticks who've hurt or killed your dogs is
fun as fuck.
Clip a torch head to the end of the sprayer's metal wand for a pilot light; run the hose to your cylinder. Me, I hung my cylinder from the hammer loop on my tool belt. Strap four gallons of diesel on your back, pump the tank good and hard with pressure so you get that distance in your mist-stream. Got a free hand? Good, stick a beer in it. Then you man the fuck up and light that pilot. Give the trigger a few test shots against something inconsequential. If your wand tip aerator is set just right, you should get an atomized mist of fuel, same as an injector pulse. And when that diesel hits that torch pilot, WHOOOSH -- flame front! Ride it, rope it, powerstroke it.
Oh yeah, that's right:
now I have a flamethrower, you fucking little disease-carrying shits from hell. And I know what you love best: carbon dioxide.
Anyway. The CO2 trap coolers set next to something tall will gather the ticks and get them into questing mode, where they hang there indefinitely on the fence in droves, waiting for a host to brush by. Except this time... what's coming for them ain't a host dog. Its
you, with your diesel flamethrower. And your beer.
So it went. Over the summer into autumn of '22, I did what amounts to a controlled burn on this farm. Up the fences, up the trees, over every square inch of ground in the barn, in the animal pens, under anything they could've laid egg nests in, everywhere. While y'all were chilling in your A/C? I sprayed fire in the heat wave of 2022. In a classic, severe, Texas 100yr drought. In 110F degrees, having just emerged from a 104F covid fever, I was out on my land, doing a by-hand controlled burn. I held the flamethrower in one hand and a garden hose in the other to keep anything that caught from getting away from me (the beer was break time, lol). Alone, no helpers as usual out here, I eradicated the fucking tick plague as an army-of-one. Permethrin resistant? Perhaps. But not to diesel fire, no you ain't.
Also, some other handy bits of random tick knowledge germane to this thread:
- The soap & water trick is only effective against fleas, not ticks -- although I will say that its
very effective against fleas, giving a quick knockdown. For the same rapid knockdown time in ticks, you can make a different aqueous-solution favorite of mine using 1 part each of isopropyl alcohol, bleach, and antiseptic mouthwash, all common household items you'll already have on-hand. Put about 1/2" of that in the bottom of a mason jar, it don't take much. I dubbed my recipe simply "tick brine", and its very handy for dropping live ticks into when you need to pick them off a dog. They will die in the brine within a minute or so. The hammer approach is also useful and fun, as is burning with a lighter or torch til they do the popcorn thing
- Pyriproxyfen, imidacloprid, and a few other adulticides & IGRs are
only effective on fleas, not ticks. Possibly s-methoprene too, can't remember. It gets confusing since so many off-the-shelf products are marketed as a one-stop solution for both pests. But when you need to tank-mix your own custom blends of these things, or when you don't want to throw the kitchen sink at your dogs and start medicating for problems they don't have, or you get selective in purchasing something to aggressively target
one and only one pest, that's when the listed efficacies become an
important distinction. So make sure you understand the difference between adulticides and IGRs. Read fine prints carefully and use a product that is actually listed for the insect species
and lifecycle stage you're targeting. Some of these compounds are specific all the way down to genus and species, ie. one compound may only be effective (or significantly more/less effective) against a brown dog tick R. sanguineus but not deer tick Ixodes scapularis, and I believe this is where Saddlebum was leading with questions about region of the country, distinctive markings on ticks, etc. Do some identification to figure out what you have.
- The dog & cat products are not effective on horses, hogs and other large livestock. Mature cattle weigh north of 1200 lbs. Pigs have very dense, tough muscle and skin tissue and mine weigh north of 700 lbs so there's no way to get enough of that product in them. If you have large animals who need parasitic insect control, you're looking at external spray or pour-ons. A rancher friend of mine recommended a very old, nearly-discontinued product called Phosmet or prolate/lintox. If you can find this locally around you, its gold. I can't say how safe it is; the shit smells nasty and you need gloves, but damned if it didn't work on the pigs, who already smell nasty anyway
- Dosing schedule: most of the products are going to say every 30 days or every ~4 weeks on the package. While this is a good guideline and remains true even up to moderate infestations, there is some flexibility both ways: you can actually stretch this out a little further to something like every 1.5mos (5-6 weeks) for lighter control without running the sebum gland stores dry, and the inverse is also true, ie. they can be used more frequently eg. every 2 weeks for a brief period to combat severe, acute infestations if you're finding efficacy tapering off too soon.
- The Seresto collars I have no first-hand experience with but have been told they're useless, so you can skip collars and go to spot-ons. By now it should be obvious that anything which cannot make good skin contact, ain't gonna work. The spot-ons are superior. Fipronil or permethrin-based should work as both of those compounds are listed for ticks. Like a shelter or large kennel operation, you may even be able to buy the isolated, pure chemical (eg. fipronil) in bulk concentrations at something like DoMyOwn, water it down and parcel it out if you have a lot of dogs to dose where 3- or 6-packs of the pipettes or pill blister packs would be cost-inefficient. But that gets hairy with correcting the dosages and often doesn't include an IGR component.
Any questions, feel free to ask. Might take some digging but I probably have answers in all the lab notes I took during the Tick War.
(Healthy pup of course) ….