Bo-Bo Knows Blood-Sucking Fiends

Bo-Bo is a tick magnet.

I guess if I was a Pollyanna, I’d consider it a compliment that he’s a sweet enough that an army of prehistoric pint-sized goons want to feast on his blood, but the optimism is lost on me. I get distracted by the feasting on his blood bit. If we’re fortunate about anything, it’s that Bo has tan-and-white hair styled in the canine equivalent of a buzz cut. When you think of the percentage of hiding spots ticks have in Bo’s coat verses the coat, of say, Cleopatra, his Afghan-hound girlfriend who often gets walked with a pink banana clip on top of her head to keep all that hair out of her eyes, we get off easy on tick patrol. Even so, those vampires are a cunning lot. Unless they choose to settle in on Bo’s legs, we can’t actually see them. They hide out in the relative depth of the hair around Bo’s neck. We’ve found one under the half-inch—half-inch!—edge of his ear, another near his doggy ding dong, and at least half a dozen in the caves between his paw pads.


Most dog owners would just dip Fido in a chemical bath or slap a nuclear-strength-flea- and-tick collar around Spike’s neck, but such brilliant inventions are a big Greyhound no-no. I don’t really get it, but the math goes something like this:

thin greyhound skin + sensitive blood = serious health hazard.

OK, fine. But blood-sucking fiends are a serious health hazard, too! Fortunately, we’ve only found dog ticks. These aren’t the lime disease carriers, but they can give humans something called Rocky Mountain Fever. And if you’re dying to know about Rocky Mountain Fever, do your own damn Google search. The last think I need is to have the symptoms of another disease in my head to pick from the next time I’m feeling a little under the weather. I already have something like a panic attack every time a migraine strikes: This feels like a stroke. What if this time it’s a stroke. This is it. The big one. I’m coming to get you Margaret! So I need to know the symptoms of Rocky Mountain Fever about as much as a problem gambler needs to be reminded of the high that comes with beating a full house with a higher full house.

It’s bad enough that the Google searches I did to determine that Bo had dog ticks and not deer ticks gave me nightmares. Have you ever looked up ticks on the Web? They don’t just give you a bullet point list of what to look for. They give you pictures. Giant poster-size prints that’ll give you flashbacks to the Saturday creature features that scared the piss out of you when you were kids. You remember? Those horror movies about insects? I remain traumatized by the one about the ants where a kid is swarmed by the things and jumps into a pool to drown them and drowns himself in the process. There was also one about a tarantula invasion. In that one a child gets cornered on a swing set. Are you itching now? I’m itching now. So, yeah. Pictures that show a tick with all those legs and gnashing teeth and what looks like a suit of armor get filed up there with the killer ants and tarantulas and come out in my dreams. Particularly this one:

I was in Ireland, but it looked a little like Venice. There were tinkers* lining the streets. There was one guy in a car with his head resting in a tin washtub filled with water. I didn’t feel this was the safest pillow and called the nurse who was on our tour with us. She woke him up and said he’d been poisoned. The remedy was a shampoo. She supported his neck with one hand, and shampooed with the other washing ticks ranging in size from the horrific silver-dollar shaped to the wake-up-before-you-crap-your-pants, king-crab size. I’m sure if I hadn’t woken up, itchy as all hell, I’d have been swallowed by the kind of tick you’d expect to see in Jurassic Park.

So what’s a poor bug-phobe to do? Due diligence, of course. At first, this was twice-daily checks in which Mike and I went on blood-sucking safaris and evicted those pesky pests first with pliers (so NOT the tool for the job as Bo’s yelp told us), then with olive oil (we’d read that olive oil would make the ticks give up the ghost; instead the smell of oil in his ear—so close to his mouth—sent Bo into a fit of trying to lick his own ear which, while amusing, did nothing for the tick), and finally with pliers (just right).

But really, who wants to spend the summer on tick patrol?

I decided to beat the bloody bastards at their own game. For about a week, Bo and I went on a very odd walk. Every bush we past was met with an inspection. If he cleared it the whole week through, it was good grass. If I found a tick hitching a ride, that place was toast…at least for the summer. And though to passing cars I’m sure it looked like I was giving my dog some seriously bad touches, we figured out that there was a nest of blood suckers in the fields down by the cemetery and in the playground by the beach—they are so off the daily tour. Combine that with Winthrop’s cruel no-dogs-on-the-beach-from-May-1-to-Oct.1 rule and Bo-Bo’s having a very urban, very concrete-only summer. We pass the entrance to the beach; he whimpers. We pass the cemetery; he whimpers. We pass the playground; he whimpers. On the plus side, there’s no more barbaric tick-removal rituals, and I’m no longer having nightmares about blood-sucking fiends.

* I think the word tinkers might be derogatory. This is the name our tour guide had for the wandering people of Ireland, but this same tour guide also told us that “tinkers” had a habit of finding things before they were lost which seemed like a stereotype to me. In any case, this was a dream.