June 8, 2026-
Thank you to Midtown Veterinary Medical Center for guest writing this blog!
After an exceedingly mild winter, we have had a beautiful and early spring! With springtime comes time spent outside in fresh grass, budding trees, and sunny days. These conditions are not just ideal for you and your dog – they are also ideal for ticks! There are three common ticks we see in NoCO, and they live in tall grassy meadows, open woods (especially along trails), and open fields.
Ticks aren’t only in the woods and mountains though – you’ll find them in your neighborhood parks as well as in your backyard. Ticks are not just pests that bite you and your pets. They can carry serious diseases they spread through their bites. There are two major diseases we see commonly in our dogs in NoCo – Ehrlichia and Anaplasmosis. You may also know about Lyme disease, which can infect both dogs and people. While Lyme disease is not officially fully established in our state, forecasts warn this is changing. More dogs test positive every year for Lyme disease, though they’ve never left the state, suggesting we have the disease in our tick population here. For these reasons, we recommend year-round preventatives for your pets.
Ticks are experts at hiding! Make sure you check spots such as your dog’s ear.
Because we are seeing new tick diseases in Colorado, it’s important to know which ticks are here, and how their populations are changing. This protects not just dogs, but also people, as there are many different tick diseases that affect people. You can help scientists with this research! The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) has a tick surveillance program to answer these very questions. Anyone can mail ticks to their office for identification, so they can look at how tick distribution is changing in our state. This will better prepare veterinarians and human doctors to consider new and emerging diseases in sick patients.
This year, the CDPHE and CSU Veterinary Teaching Hospital partnered to expand their tick surveillance program. You may encounter new information panels at trailheads, such as the one pictured below at the Environmental Learning Center East Drake Site. These boards have information on the best ways to check for and remove ticks safely from yourself and your pet. There are kits to submit whatever ticks you find and surveys to fill out if you did not find a tick. If you find a tick and are not close to one of these stations, you can mail the tick to the CDPHE yourself. You can find submission information, as well as more information on ticks and tick-borne diseases in Colorado, here.
Ticks are great examples of “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” We are fortunate to have this program available. Your submission will help keep the pets and people in our community safe and healthy.
