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How to get one off properly, and what to watch for in the week after.
De Pet Valley · · 4 min read
Stop reading and phone a vet if your dog is listless, off its food, feverish, pale in the gums or passing dark urine in the weeks after a tick — biliary moves quickly and cannot be treated at home.
If your dog is flat, off its food, feverish or passing dark urine, phone a vet now — that is what biliary looks like, and it is not something to sit out. If the dog seems well, the job is simply to get the tick off promptly and in one piece, and then to keep an eye on it for the next few weeks.
You want the tick off soon, and you want it out whole. Use fine-point tweezers or a hooked tick remover. Fingernails are the wrong tool: they grip the body instead of the head, and that is where most of the trouble starts.
Get the tips in right against the skin, around the tick's head end, not around the swollen body. With tweezers, pull straight up with slow, even pressure until it lets go. With a hooked remover, slide the fork in under the tick and lift with the light turning motion the pack describes. Do not jerk, and do not squeeze while you pull.
Drop the tick into a sealed bag or a jar of soapy water rather than crushing it between your fingers. Wash your hands afterwards and clean the bite with water or a mild antiseptic. A small firm lump at the site for a few days afterwards is ordinary.
Do not burn a tick off with a match, a cigarette or a hot needle. Do not smother it in vaseline, petroleum jelly, nail polish, paraffin or cooking oil. All of these leave the tick attached and distressed for longer, which is the opposite of what you are trying to achieve, and the burning ones risk a scorched dog on top of a tick.
Do not twist the body off and do not yank. Both tend to snap the tick in half, leaving the mouthparts in the skin and pushing gut contents back into the bite.
If a fragment of mouthpart does stay behind, leave it alone. Skin works a fragment out much as it works out a splinter. Digging after it with a needle does more damage than the fragment. If the bite site turns hot, swollen or weepy over the days that follow, that is a vet visit.
Ticks in South Africa carry babesiosis — biliary, as almost everyone calls it. The parasite attacks red blood cells, and a dog can become seriously ill after a single bite. It is common enough in this country that any dog which has had ticks and then goes off colour is treated as a suspect until a vet says otherwise.
Signs usually appear days to a couple of weeks after the bite, by which time the tick itself is often long gone. Watch for a dog that is dull and uninterested, off its food, warm to the touch, breathing faster than usual, or passing urine the colour of strong tea. Gums that look pale, or yellow-tinged, are a serious sign.
There is no home treatment for this. Biliary is confirmed on a blood test and treated with prescription medicine, sometimes alongside a transfusion, and dogs brought in early do far better than dogs that are watched for another day. Ticks also spread ehrlichiosis, tick bite fever, which starts just as vaguely and also needs a vet.
Phone a vet the same day if your dog is listless, feverish, off its food, pale or yellow in the gums, passing dark urine, unsteady on its legs or bleeding from the nose in the weeks after ticks. Do not wait for morning to see how it looks.
Some removals are also a vet job rather than a kitchen-table one. A tick deep in the ear canal, on the eyelid, or anywhere you cannot get a clean grip is better taken out by someone with the right instrument and light. A puppy or a small dog carrying a heavy load of ticks needs checking too — enough ticks take enough blood to make a small animal anaemic.
Prevention is the part of this you actually control. Spot-ons, oral tablets and chews, tick collars and rinses all exist, and they differ in how long they last and what else they cover. Have a vet match the product to your dog's age, weight and health, then follow the pack exactly. Never put a dog tick product on a cat — some ingredients that are routine for dogs are dangerous for cats — and do not double up two products without asking first.
Run your hands over the dog after walks through long grass or on the veld, particularly through the warm months. Ticks favour the ears and the folds around them, the neck under the collar, the armpits, the groin and between the toes. Keeping grass short and clearing leaf piles helps: a sunnier, tidier garden holds fewer of them.