Can my dog still get fleas and ticks in the winter?

Definitely—mostly the ticks; depending on which tick it is and where you live, you will see Lyme ticks even in January, even in the snow. Certain ticks, deer ticks, brown dog ticks, lone star tick, they do live in different parts of the country, and they like different environments. So we will see them at different times of the year, but certainly in the winter.

And fleas, they like it up until the grass dies and it's wholly browned out, which takes a long time, not just one frost. And then they'll be back as soon as the weather gets warm and the grass starts to grow. So it’s a very long season for fleas and ticks, especially here in Maryland.

They can, especially here in Kentucky—it's not like Alaska, where it gets super cold, so we see fleas and ticks all year round.

Absolutely. As we mentioned, ticks are a year-round problem and this part of the country. Here in North Carolina, we do see ticks year-round, and there are seven different species of ticks in North Carolina. I think there's an introduction of a new one that we're more concerned about. With fleas, typically, once we have a killing frost outside, meaning if it gets down 25, 26 degrees for two nights back to back, that will be the end of our flea season outside. But still, fleas can thrive inside the house in the wintertime. Let's face that. You've got the thermostat set at 65 or 68 degrees, and fleas are pretty happy. They've got a meal with the dogs or with a cat inside the household. They're not going to be as active because the humidity is lower.

Three different conditions help fleas thrive, which is why we see more problems in the autumn. The three conditions include that they need a certain amount of rain. So if we have an extraordinary dry type of a year, we're not going to see as many fleas. For reproduction purposes, they prefer temperatures of more than 80 degrees. If we have consistently high temperatures in the nineties, scratching around a hundred degrees, we're not usually going to see as many fleas. The other criterion is humidity. Humidity is a given here all summer and into the autumn. That condition is never going to change. Drought conditions and overly wet conditions can change from year to year, but, in general, that's why we see more problems in the autumn because the temperatures are starting to let up a little bit. It's going to be more consistent in the 80-degree range. We might get a hurricane that can drop some rain here, but the more rain, the cooler the temperatures, relatively speaking. That's why we see more fleas in the autumn than at any other time of year.

Yes, that's a question I get very commonly. While some fleas and ticks can go dormant in the winter, they must be exposed to certain conditions, and they often do not go completely dormant. So there are still active fleas and ticks even in the winter.