City-Tricks for Hick-Ticks

by Malcolm Riordan

The talent show of dealing with ticks on our pets seems a lightning rod for drama, freak-outs and myths.  How is it that so many pet owners are under the spell of the exact same myths and closely held beliefs?  It must be that old-school oral traditions can still carry the day.

Offered here are some tick removal guidelines to transform a potential family circus into a simple, quiet little minute.

Get control of your pet! No squirming or struggling to get away – this so that you can do the few simple things with both hands free and in a comfortable posture for accuracy and smoothness.  Get someone to hold your dog or cat.

Now, make sure it is in fact a tick! There's no elegant outcome in pulling on nipples or looks-like-a-tick skin growths.  You need to see those insect legs before you start in on the pulling.

The tick removal is best done without squeezing the body of the tick. You do not want to crush or squeeze the tick as doing so might inject any harmful bacteria within the tick into your dog or cat.

To avoid squeezing the tick body, use fine-tipped tweezers to grasp the tick as close to the skin surface as possible, grabbing the tick by the head or mouth parts, right where they enter the skin.

Pull upward with steady, even pressure.  No twisting required!  Twisting or jerking on the tick can cause the mouth-parts to break off and remain in the skin.

If breakage occurs, take a nice easy calm shot at removing the mouth-parts with tweezers. If you are unable to remove the mouth parts easily with clean tweezers, leave it alone!  Let the skin heal.  This is a low-level time to invoke the "above all, do no harm" philosophy.

Ticks secrete a mixture of anticoagulant and protein based cement in their saliva. This and the barbed nature of their mouth parts create much of the rational difficulty of tick removal.  It is not uncommon for a welt or other skin reaction to occur in response to tick saliva getting loose under the skin. And whether you removed the tick right away - or it fell off after feeding, it can take time, a week or even months for the healing of a tick bite reaction to complete.

Again, at the times when you've been unable to remove some (or all) of the tick mouth parts, not to worry: In every study to date, mouthpart remnants retained in the skin are not associated with transmission of the various tick borne infections –  Lyme disease being the most studied example. Any remnant mouthpart(s) are expelled as foreign bodies, or eventually are sloughed - as all skin is.

Avoid folklore remedies such as painting an attached tick with nail polish, petroleum jelly, or using heat to make the tick detach from the skin. Tweezers, or the specific tick removal tools that are readily available, are all superior to willy-nilly applications of various scary household liquids, or the precarious stunt of heating the tick's rear-end.   The worst is to combine the two styles and cause a hair fire – not only inelegant, but an epic breach of "above all, do no harm." 

For a whole page of tick removing devices, visit Tick Removal.

 After you've run the city-tricks on the hick-ticks, there are still a few wrap-up concerns to consider during a precautionary hand washing:
Should it seem necessary - as for any other insect bite - use of triple antibiotic topical preparations with or without hydrocortisone (Neosporin, topical hydrocortisone) may relieve some of the inflammation and/or itching. 

The idea of routinely using prescribed oral antibiotics (usually doxycycline or amoxicillin) - as prevention against risk that disease had already been transmitted before tick removal - is not recommended. In both veterinary and human medicine, the overall risk of acquiring any of the tick borne bacterial diseases is quite low. Further, in both professions, there are the responsibility guidelines regarding how unnecessary antibiotic use can lead to creation of antibiotic resistance.

The likelihood of infection following tick bites - while quite low overall - does increase with the duration of the tick's attachment.  Few infections will occur with less than 24 hours of attachment, where as attachment for 48 – 72 hours is associated with a much higher risk of disease transmission.  For Lyme disease, the tick must be attached for 36-48 hours or more before the bacteria can be transmitted to the host from a carrier tick.

While ticks cause freak-outs, nuisance and even a threat to the health of both man and man's best friends, regular body checks, the earliest tick removal, and use of the readily available monthly topical preventatives - can minimize that risk.

And you should know there is no internet substitute for having an established therapeutic, triangular alliance of you, your pet and your local veterinarian.

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Woods Rafter Cat Image on Banner by Malcolm Riordan.