Tyler, Longview & East Texas
Protection Dogs

The Companion Animal Parasite Council publishes county-level results from the heartworm tests veterinary labs run on dogs. On CAPC’s 2025 map, 1.92 percent of dogs tested in Dallas County were heartworm-positive and 1.10 percent in Collin County. In Smith County, around Tyler, it was 4.67 percent. In Gregg County, around Longview, 4.82. Further into the Piney Woods it climbs: 6.30 percent in Nacogdoches County, 7.05 in Angelina County around Lufkin, 9.04 in Rusk County. The tick-borne Ehrlichia results move the same direction — 3.28 percent of dogs screened in Smith County against 0.95 in Dallas County.

The national picture agrees. The American Heartworm Society’s April 2026 release reported that “Texas leads the nation in heartworm incidence” on testing from 2025, and the society’s president, interviewed by dvm360 about the same map, described the high-incidence area as “predominantly eastern Texas”.

That is why this page exists. A personal protection dog in East Texas is not a different animal from one in Dallas, and we would not pretend the drive changes the training. What it changes is how unforgiving a missed month of prevention becomes, and for a dog whose whole value is conditioning and practice, a heartworm diagnosis costs far more than a vet bill. We are not veterinarians and this is not veterinary advice; your East Texas vet sets the protocol. This is the owner’s side of it.

Here is the 2025 heartworm column for the counties this page covers, with Dallas and Collin counties underneath for scale. Positive results out of dogs tested, all year, read off the CAPC map by selecting each county.

Read these with their limits attached. CAPC’s own note on the map says the data comes from three commercial labs and represents, by its estimate, less than 30 percent of the testing activity in an area. The denominator is dogs that were tested, not every dog in the county, and the small counties carry small samples: Harrison County’s 6.35 percent is 45 dogs out of 709, and Upshur County, north of Longview, posted 15.5 percent on just 877 tests. Treat any single county figure as a signal rather than a measurement.

And this is not the worst place in Texas. Cameron County at the southern tip of the Valley ran 12.03 percent in the same data, and several Gulf Coast counties sit above Smith and Gregg. What matters for a dog moving from Dallas to a Tyler backyard is the change in odds. Across the East Texas side of the state, a dog goes from a county where roughly one tested dog in fifty is positive to one in twenty near Tyler and Longview, one in fifteen around Marshall, Nacogdoches and Lufkin, and one in eleven in Rusk County. A prevention routine that got away with a missed month in Collin County is playing worse odds in Rusk County.

Why here. Texas Parks and Wildlife describes the Pineywoods as rolling pine and oak country with rich hardwood bottomlands, where 36 to 50 inches of rain a year is “fairly uniformly distributed throughout the year”. That describes the country. It does not explain the numbers: the CAPC maps record where positive tests came from, not why, and this page does not try to supply a reason they do not give.

A dog arriving in Smith or Angelina County should arrive with its parasite history written down. Ask these of whoever is selling you a dog. If the paperwork is not there, that is the answer.

East Texas lives around water, and a high-drive dog will go into it after anything that moves. At Caddo Lake State Park, past Marshall, Texas Parks and Wildlife’s own page states it plainly: “Alligators live in the park.” The department’s alligator safety guidance is unusually direct about dogs: pets are “the size and shape of common alligator prey,” should be kept from the water’s edge on leashes no longer than six feet, and should not drink from or enter the water in alligator habitat.

That rule asks more of a working breed than of a lap dog, which is exactly why it is worth training for. A dog that will hold a down on a dock while a fish splashes, or leave a heron on the bank on one word, is showing you the same impulse control you are paying for at the front door. A dog that will not is telling you something before the stakes are high. The shoreline is also snake country: TPWD places the southern copperhead in “the eastern one-third of the state” and the cottonmouth across the eastern half in swamps and slow water. Snakes have their own write-up in our guide to rattlesnakes and dogs in Texas, so we will leave it there.

To be plain about the map: we have no office, kennel or trainer in East Texas and have published no placement records for this region, so read nothing on this page as a claim about dogs already living in Smith or Gregg County. Every dog for a Piney Woods home starts its trip in North Texas and travels east with us.

By our own rough routing from central Dallas, Tyler is about 100 miles and under two hours, Longview about 130 miles and a little over two, Marshall about 150, and Nacogdoches and Lufkin roughly 165 miles and a bit over three hours. Treat those as approximations, not a published schedule. What the distance buys East Texas buyers is a choice the far corners of the state do not get as easily: you can come to us first and watch the dogs work in North Texas before anything is decided. That is the whole argument of our Dallas–Fort Worth page, and from Tyler it is a morning’s drive.

The handover still happens at your house. We bring the dog to you and train the family in the home it will actually live in — your doors, your gate, your stairs, your driveway — because that is where a finished dog either transfers to its new handler or does not. The standard a dog has to meet before it makes that drive is on the fully trained page, and the PSA trial schedules that list the two of us as decoys can be checked from the record on our about page. What the purchase includes is on our page about buying a protection dog from us. We do not publish prices; the market-wide figures, each sourced, are on our pricing page, and what a first conversation with us covers is written out in what happens on the first call.