How to remove a tick

The best way to remove a tick is to pull it off gently, leaving the tick and its mouth parts intact. This can be difficult because some ticks cement their mouth parts into the skin. Every effort should be made to remove this cement if it does not come out with the tick. Applying heat, alcohol, petroleum jelly or fingernail polish to an embedded tick is not effective.

To be safe, though, you\'ll want to remove the tick as soon as possible because risk of infection increases between 24 to 72 hours after the tick attaches to the skin.

Note of Caution – How to remove a tick

Don\'t use petroleum jelly or a hot match to kill and remove a tick.

If a tick is removed within 24 hours, the chances of it transmitting Lyme disease or other infections are much less. The illustrations (right) show how to remove a tick properly. Use fine-point tweezers to grasp the tick as close to the skin as possible. Pull gently. Avoid squeezing the body of the tick. Clean the site of the bite, your hands and the tweezers with disinfectant. You may want to wear protective gloves.

Method – How to remove a tick

Rub the tick in a circular motion and pretend you\'re trying to make the tick dizzy. I generally stick with one direction, clockwise. It usually takes less than a minute, so if it\'s not working, make sure the body of the tick is moving around. Remember you can\'t get dizzy unless you\'re actually moving in a circle, quickly. I doubt the tick actually gets dizzy, but they sure don\'t like something about the movement and they crawl out on their own

The ticks suck the blood of their victims and drop off when they become full. A female tick, after mating, which often occurs on the host animal, lays thousands of eggs on the ground. The eggs hatch into larva, and after they feed for a period of time the larva molt into the nymph stage. Both the larva and nymph stages of our hard-bodied ticks feed on the blood of lizards, birds, and small mammals. It\'s extremely uncommon for the larva and nymph stages of our ticks to attach to humans.

Tips - How to remove a tick

Put on latex gloves to avoid direct contact with the tick and contaminated skin, as diseases can be transmitted from tick to pet to human.

Look to see if a tick is protruding from the skin. Ticks are tiny black, brown, reddish or tan disklike arachnids (having eight legs), about the size of the head of a pin. If they have attached themselves to their host (your pet), then they can swell up to the size of a grape in some cases.

When the tick is grabbed with tweezers or similar instruments, the tool exerts a pressure on the tick\'s body: this pressure promotes saliva back-flow in the host skin, and increases the risk of injection of allergenic matters and above all the risk of transmission of tick-borne microorganisms. When the tick is grasped with a specialist tool, there is no pressure on the tick\'s body, thus, reducing the risk of the injection of allergenic matters and the transmission of microorganisms.

To remove a tick, use a pair of fine-tipped tweezers or special tick removal instruments. These special devices allow one to remove the tick without squeezing the tick body. This is important as you do not want to crush the tick and force harmful bacteria to leave the tick and enter your pet\'s bloodstream.