Ear Mites on Dogs

Symptoms

Ear mites are easy for pet owners to tell. If your dog is scratching the area around the ear and shaking his head excessively for a while, you'd better be wary if he is having ear mites. You should check the scratched ear of your pooch immediately since you noticed his abnormal behaviors. If you find any dark-colored, crumbly reddish crusts in your dog's ear and smell a foul odor, then you can tell yes, it's ear mites! If you don't notice these early signs and take your dog to the vet, the prolonged scratching would cause severe wounds and inflammation on the back skin of their ears and could damage their hearing.

Reasons

You might be curious about how your dog gets these annoying bugs. Well, one thing you have to know is that ear mites are highly contagious. As long as your dog is playing outside, they are under the risk of ear mites. Dogs can easily pick up ear mites from other dogs or cats. If one dog in the community is having ear mites, then other dogs who often play with him would most likely get ear mites as well. Ear mites can travel from animal to animal by sticking to the loose hair. What's even worse is ear mites have a strong ability to reproduce themselves. Female ear mites can produce 5 eggs daily and it takes only 5 days for the eggs to hatch. Soonly there would be a big family living in your dog's ear.

Treatment

I know there are a bunch of home remedies for treating ear mites right now, but before you try any of them, go to see the vet first! Don't let your dog be the laboratory mouse for those remedies. Also, if you have other dogs or cats as pets, don’t forget to take them to do a check-up. It's possible that ear mites have already transport to other members of the family. The first thing vets usually do is to use an otoscope to determine if the inflammation of the ear canal is due to ear mites. There are other causes can lead to similar symptoms of ear mites, that's also why I always recommend pet owners to see the vet first. Then, the vet will do a thorough cleaning of your dog's ears to remove and kill the mites. After that, they will prescribe an anti-parasitic medication to your dog. If the case is more severe, the vet will add some antibiotics as the treatment.

Prevention

To keep your dog away from ear mites is not as hard as you think. Although ear mites are highly contagious, there still are some strategies for every pet owner to try. The key to prevent ear mites is to keep a clean environment in your dog's ears. You should bathe your pup frequently up to once a month and take him to do regular check-ups every month. Also, you should keep your living place clean to reduce the chance of picking up ear mites.