How To Spot, Remove And Prevent Ticks | Vet Tips

hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kirsten veterinarian here at Many Pets. so you want to know about ticks? today I'm going to talk about how do you look for them what's the easiest way to remove them and most importantly how do we prevent them step number one search pesky parasites can buy anywhere on the body but there are going to be some locations that they prefer more than others and those are going to be places with a shorter hair coat they don't have to work as hard to bury down to the skin this is going to include places like the face and around the eyes the groin and the armpits and in between the toes be sure to check your pup when you come back from Walks from heavily wooded areas or areas that have tall grasses low hanging shrubs or trees now don't forget ticks also will happily bite humans so you need to give yourself a once over also ticks can look a couple different ways so for a tick that has not taken a blood meal yet you are looking for a creature that is small black and usually oval shaped sometimes you might be able to see the legs and sometimes you might not now once a tick has attached and started to suck blood they will become enlarged and often get confused for a growth or even a nipple trust me I get asked this question all the time step two removal if you find a tick on your pet one of the easiest ways to remove it is using a specialty tick removing tool if you don't have one of those you can also use a pair of tweezers some people also have a set of medical forceps or chemostats at home something that you can grab onto carefully now if you are not using a tick removing tool and you are using something like tweezers please be very careful it is very easy to pinch your pet's skin the reason why this is the case is because when you are removing a tick you want to use whatever Implement you have and get as close to the skin as possible without pinching the reason this is important is because if you do not remove the entire tick and parts of the head or mouth parts are left behind this can cause significant irritation and infection in your pet skin if you are going to try removal yourself it is really important to just be careful so you will start by slowly parting the hair down to where the tick is attached if you're using a specialty tick remover tool often these are plastic and have a small slot at the base you will gently slide that along where the tick is attached and slowly twist in a circle until it is removed if you are using something like tweezers again very carefully grab as far down to the base as you can and gently pull until the mouth releases step 3 prevention now let's talk about how do we keep these ticks away in the first place we know that yes obviously ticks are gross right they give us the heebie-jeebies we don't like them but in addition to being gross really the problem comes down to ticks are transmitters of infectious disease and that's why we as veterinarians want to talk about prevention now one of the most common diseases that ticks can transmit that people are familiar with is Lyme disease and that's because people can be affected with Lyme disease as well now as we spread away from the UK there are several other tick-borne diseases that we can see such as erlikia anaplasma and babesia if you know your pet has been exposed to a tick it's important to keep your eyes out for signs of tick-borne diseases just to be on the safe side now the hard part is is that tick-borne diseases commonly cause very vague or general clinical signs about four weeks after exposure that might be when we start to see things like lethargy fever even signs of things like joint swelling because of these diseases this is why veterinarians just recommend prevention in the first place prevention is almost always going to be easier than treatment when it comes to these situations now there's a couple different ways we can go about preventing ticks and that includes both oral preventatives and spot-on or topical preventatives most of these are going to be administered once a month and it is important that we do this on schedule for them to be effective an important reminder is that our spot on treatments or our topical treatments are going to hopefully prevent biting in the first place however oral tick preventatives do require the tick to bite to ingest the drug and be killed so do not panic if you know your dog is on an oral preventative and you see a tick typically if the drug is doing its job it will kill the tick before disease is transmitted a pro tip if you are worried about removal or if you are unsure about doing it yourself please ask your veterinarian we are more than happy to help remove a tick and be sure the whole thing is gone the safety and the efficacy of these treatments has continued to be proven and so it sticks to my Mantra of prevention is going to be better than treatment so go enjoy those walks in the woods and I hope you found this video helpful foreign