Great video -- everyone should know this

[kcjenkins]

 

[kcjenkins]

I got this from Catherine, when she shared this on Facebook, it's so valuable I just had to share it here. 

[jklcpa]

I don't agree with this at all and think this is dangerous advice. The most widely accepted method of tick removal from the CDC and medical community says to not press on the tick's body and disturb the tick as little as possible when removing it so that it does not regurgitate it's stomach contents back into the person or pet it has attached to.  In addition to that, this method may be just as likely to break off the mouthparts and leave those in the skin. While that may also happen when removing ticks with fine-tipped tweezers or tick removal tools, those methods are far less likely to cause the tick to spew tick-borne diseases back into its host.  Any mouthparts that are left behind may cause anything from a little irritation to a small localized infection, but all the times I've had that happen, the body quickly isolated the bits left behind and they lifted off with a tiny scab of skin about a week later.

I just had that exact thing last week when I used a tick removal tool inside one of my dog's ears, and I could feel something like a splinter left in the skin. It never got infected, never formed a scab, and never showed any irritation either. A small piece of dried skin flaked off a week later with the mouthpart embedded in it, and the skin underneath was perfect.

The ticks are really bad this year here because of all the snow cover we had last winter. People think that the cold temperatures kill them but the snow actually acts like an insulator and the ticks actually survive better in cold temps if there is that snow cover like we had this past season.