The process of removing a tick, or God forbid multiple ticks, from your dog is not the most pleasant, but it is crucial to do it correctly and promptly. Once you know exactly how to do it, removing ticks will become a fairly easy thing to do.
Ticks are known to carry many infectious organisms and on a yearly basis ticks infect thousands upon thousands of animals and even people with various illnesses such as babesiosis, Lyme disease, and ehrlichiosis, among many others. These pathogen transmissions can occur anywhere from three to six hours after a bite occurs, that means the sooner you remove the tick from you or your dog’s body the lesser the chance that sickness will occur.
Ticks have a one – piece body, coupled with harpoon like barbs on its mouth that let it attach itself onto a host to feed. The crablike legs that they have and the sticky secretion help them to further stabiles and hold on to the host.
They can range in size from nearly being impossible to see with the naked eye, up to the size of a human fingertip, which is pretty big. Just the United States has about 200 different tick species. Ticks survive and actually thrive anywhere, such as woods, beach grass, lawns, forests and even more urban areas. They are not particularly picky eaters either, they will latch on to anything, no matter if it’s a mammal, bird or insect.
How to remove a tick from a dog
The most common and effective way to do this is to use tweezers to carefully extract the tick. However, not just any tweezers will work in this situation. The most common tweezers have large and blunt tips, the tweezers you will need though, have to be fine point ones as to avoid tearing the tick in half and in turn spreading possible infections onto the bite area.
First off you need to spread the dog’s fur so the tick is completely visible. Then grasp onto the tick as close to the skin as you can possibly get. Afterwards, very gently pull straight upwards in a rather slow and steady motion, as this will prevent the tick’s mouth from breaking off and remaining fixed on the skin.
The common belief among people is that it’s actually the tick’s head that can be left on the skin if an extraction goes wrong, but ticks don’t have heads, speaking in the conventional sense, so basically what gets embedded into your dog’s skin is known as the mouth parts.
Another good option that is even easier to get the hang of is to use a tick removal hook tool. It is particularly useful if you live in an area that is infested with ticks where your dog is frequently used as a host to these nefarious ugly creatures. Using them is simple, just put the prongs on either side of the tick, then gently twist upward to remove it from the dog’s skin.
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