A hiker recently posted a photo that made a lot of dog people’s skin crawl: roughly two dozen ticks, pulled off their own body and their dog’s, piled into a food-storage container after a walk that lasted about half an hour. The detail that stuck with people was not the count. It was the aside that the dog was already on a monthly tick preventive. The medication was doing its job, and the ticks still came.
That is the uncomfortable, useful lesson buried in a gross viral moment. Preventives are essential and every active dog in tick country should be on one. But no product is a force field. The thing that actually catches ticks before they can hurt your dog is not a pill or a topical. It is your hands, running over your dog after every walk, and knowing what to do the second you feel a bump that shouldn’t be there.
Why the check matters more than the medicine
Here is the biology that makes early detection so powerful. Nearly every tick-borne illness needs a stretch of attached feeding time, generally 24 to 48 hours, before the pathogen can move from the tick into your dog. That lag is your window. A tick you find and remove within a few hours of a walk has had almost no chance to transmit anything. A tick that rides home unnoticed and feeds for two days is a different situation entirely.
So the routine is simple and it is not optional in tick season: after any walk through grass, brush, or woods, go over your dog by hand. Ticks like to climb toward the head, so check the ears, the folds around the face and neck, under the collar, in the armpits, and between the toes. You are feeling for a small bump. The earlier you find it, the less it matters.
How to get it off without making things worse
Once you spot one, the removal itself is quick if you do it right.
Start with the right tool. Fine-tipped tweezers work, and there are purpose-built tick tools too, from simple grasping tweezers to slit-style tools with a V-shaped notch and rotation tools sized for larger ticks. If your tool came with instructions, follow them; some are designed for a specific motion.
Put on gloves before you touch the tick, which protects you from anything it is carrying. Then part the fur around it so you can see precisely where it has latched onto the skin.
Grasp the tick as close to the skin as you can and pull straight up, using firm and even pressure. This is the step people get wrong. Do not jerk it, and do not twist it. A sharp or twisting motion can break the mouthparts off and leave them buried in your dog. You want the whole tick to come out in one piece.
Once it is out, clean the spot where it was attached and give your own hands a thorough wash.
Then, oddly enough, keep the tick. Seal it in a small container and label it with the date and where on your dog’s body you found it. If your dog develops symptoms in the coming weeks, that little specimen can help your vet figure out what you are dealing with. It is also a safe way to dispose of it, without crushing it, which can spread pathogens, or tossing it back into the yard. No container handy? A dunk in rubbing alcohol works, or seal it inside a tight fold of tape.
The removal “tricks” that are actually myths
You will still hear people swear by home remedies to make a tick “back out.” Ignore them. Petroleum jelly, heat, a lit match, nail polish, alcohol painted on the tick, none of these reliably work, and worse, irritating an embedded tick can prompt it to regurgitate into the bite, potentially increasing the risk of disease transmission. Mechanical removal, straight up and out, is the only method worth using.
And if a bit of mouthpart does stay behind after removal, resist the urge to dig for it. The mouthparts on their own are not going to cause disease, and the body usually works them out or forms a small bump that heals on its own. Excavating the site does more harm than the fragment.
Watch your dog after the bite
Removing the tick is not quite the end. Keep an eye on your dog for the next few weeks. Dogs often fight off tick-borne infections without ever getting sick, but not always, and the signs can be easy to miss. Watch for limping or shifting lameness, a change in appetite, fever, swollen or painful joints, and unusual fatigue. Any of these after a known tick bite is a reason to call your vet promptly, even if you got the tick off cleanly.
“The mistake I see is people relaxing the moment the tick is out, but the window that matters comes after,” says Dr. Lena Park. “If your dog turns oddly tired, off their food, or sore in the joints in the weeks following a bite, don’t wait it out. Early treatment is where these infections are won or lost, and your vet can weigh whether your region and that particular tick warrant getting ahead of it.”
What’s new since this was written
If it feels like ticks are worse and spreading, that is not just a bad-summer impression, it is the data. The Asian longhorned tick, first confirmed in the U.S. in 2017, has now been reported in roughly 20 states across the East, Midwest, and South, and modeling suggests much of the country is suitable habitat. What makes it unnervingly effective is that the females can reproduce without mating, so a single tick can seed an entire population in a new yard.
The disease picture is shifting too. Researchers at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station documented, for the first time, longhorned ticks carrying the bacterium behind ehrlichiosis. And scientists have confirmed a newly identified pathogen in dogs, a spotted-fever-group species provisionally called Rickettsia finnyi, first detected in 2018 and turning up in dogs across the Southeast and Midwest with signs resembling Rocky Mountain spotted fever. It is suspected to be spread by the lone star tick, whose range is expanding across large stretches of the country.
The takeaway is not panic. It is that year-round prevention plus the after-walk hand check matters more every season, not less, because the ticks are reaching places, and carrying things, they did not used to.
This is health information, not a substitute for your veterinarian’s advice about your individual dog and region.
References
- CDC, “Where Ticks Live.” https://www.cdc.gov/ticks/about/where-ticks-live.html
- USDA APHIS, “Asian Longhorned Ticks.” https://www.aphis.usda.gov/livestock-poultry-disease/cattle/ticks/asian-longhorned
- Companion Animal Parasite Council, “2026 Annual Pet Parasite Forecasts.” https://capcvet.org/articles/2026-annual-pet-parasite-forecasts/
- NBC News, “Scientists warn of invasive longhorned tick carrying debilitating Ehrlichiosis infection.” https://www.nbcnews.com/science/climate-change/longhorned-tick-ehrlichiosis-spreads-climate-change-rcna223487
