The best (DIY) way to remove ticks from your Dog

For most dog-owners, tick infestation is a familiar and sometimes regular occurrence during their seasons. We even have annual tick seasons during which tick population increase to ts peak on dogs and in dog environment. This is usually during rainy season and summer time in tropical and temperate environments respectively. Whenever ticks are found  appear on our dogs, it can be of grave concern and frustrating to eliminate because of the discomfort caused and the fact that they put the dog at risk of diseases. These conditions may range from general discomfort to risk, severe itching, skin abnormalities, secondary bacterial infections and transmission of deadly diseases such as babesiosis, ehrlichiosis and anasplasmosis. They also cause discomfort for humans for obvious aesthetic reasons due to their affinity to migrate around the house into our kitchens and bedrooms or in extreme cases when they latch on to humans too and cause illnesses too.

However, the great news is that for whenever time you notice a tick on your dogs skins – whether on the outer ears, inside the paws, on the back and around the lower abdomen – you can limit their spread on time by removing the ticks YOURSELF. Now many of us may be doing this already once we sight them on our dogs, but the bad news is that most of us do it wrongly – unknowingly causing more harm than good for the dog.

So, lets take a step-by-step basis on how to correctly remove ticks from your dogs or any other pet/animal.

Materials needed

• A small bowl
• Some alcohol or spirit
• Forceps or tweezers (or any small home instrument with good grasp)
• Cotton wool

Steps

1. Pour a small quantity of spirit or alcohol into a bowl (1 – 3 capfuls depending on number of ticks to be removed)
2. Take your forceps and grasp the body of the tick firmly. The tick will gradually loosen its grip on the skin of the dog where it is attached.
3. Pull tick gently away from the skin in a straight steady motion and place the tick in the bowl of alcohol/spirit (where it would obviously die off)
4. Since a small amount of blood is expected from the site of tick removal, gently dab the site with cotton wool soaked in a little quantity of spirit or disinfectant to clean the area and allow to heal.

Donts …

• Don’t press, burst or squash the ticks with your hands/fingers/legs. This is a big NO-NO especially for the big ticks which are the female ticks. The female ticks carry the eggs which accounts for their big size relative to their male counterparts. So, if you press or squash them, you will only succeed in expelling the eggs into your environment. This eggs which will eventually hatch into more ticks that would go on to re-infest your dog again.
• Don’t force the removal of the tick attached to the dog’s skin. Because the ticks are always tightly attached to the dog’s skin, removing them forcibly from the skin can cause a laceration or wound on your dog’s skin which may lead to a considerable blood loss or end up being infected.

Remember that other ways of controlling or preventing tick infestation on your dog is by….

• Giving your dog a SUPERVISED tick bath
• Undertaking a SUPERVISED fumigation of your house

These are best done by or under the close supervision of a veterinarian to avoid dangerous mistakes, side-effects or (human or animal) casualties.

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