Spending a lot of time outdoors is a great way to make the most of your Toronto summer. Unfortunately, it puts you at risk of running into a common summer pest: ticks. Toronto’s tick problem is as bad as ever, and that can impact your family’s health.

Ticks feed off of blood. Unlike mosquitos, though, they’re not satisfied with landing, feeding, then flying away. Instead, ticks hang on, biting a person or an animal, and then try to stay put for several days. While they’re on someone, they are constantly feeding and potentially transmitting disease.

Luckily, if you do find a tick on yourself or someone else in your household, you can remove it without too much difficulty. The quicker you remove a tick, the better your chances of avoiding tick-borne diseases.

That makes staying tick-free an important part of staying healthy while you explore the outside world. For Torontonians unfamiliar with tick removal, try the following easy techniques!

How to Remove Ticks Easily

The trick to removing ticks is that you want to remove them in one piece. The diseases ticks carry, like the deeply uncomfortably Lyme Disease, mostly live in their digestive system.

If you accidentally squish a tick during the removal process, the germs can wind up in the tick bite wound. That can lead to an infection just as often as leaving the tick alone.

The easiest and cheapest method of tick-removal is the “straw and string” method. All you need for this removal is a drinking straw and some thin string or dental floss.

• First, put the straw over the tick at about a 45-degree angle. The straw is there to guide the string around the tick.
• Next, wrap the string around the straw and tie a loose knot in it.
• Guide the knotted string down the straw and around the tick. Ease the string up until the loop is around the tick’s mouth.
• Slowly and carefully pull the knot tight, then pull the entire string upwards. The tick should detach without a problem.

If you regularly go walking in the woods, you can also get specific tick-removal tools. These tools work on the same principle as the straw and string method, getting the tick to detach without squishing it.

There are some folk methods that you should avoid using, including:

• Using a match to burn the tick.
• Covering the tick in petroleum jelly.
• Just grabbing the tick and tugging it off.

All of these methods can lead to your family or your pets catching Lyme disease from these pests, and quite possible to uncomfortable treatments or serious health problems.

Avoiding Ticks in the First Place

The best way to keep yourself tick-free is to avoid them in the first place. There are two ways to do this when you’re outside: wearing protective clothing and removing ticks from areas in which you spend your time.

Protective clothing includes tall socks, long pants, and long sleeves. Thicker material is better because it keeps ticks from biting you through your clothes. By keeping as much skin as possible covered, you can keep ticks from hitching a ride.

 

The easier option is to just clear ticks from your yard. Keep grass short and shrubs well-trimmed, so ticks don’t have any places to hide.

Ensuring animals considered pests aren’t living or traveling through your yard will also prevent ticks from being in your yard to begin with.

For questions about these methods or to learn other easy ways to keep your home, yard, family, and pets tick-free, work with a professional pest control specialist!

About the Author:

Daniel Mackie, co-owner of Greenleaf Pest Control, is a Toronto pest control expert and a regular guest on HGTV. He is renowned in the industry as an innovator of safe, effective pest control solutions. Mackie and business partner Sandy Costa were the first pest control professionals in Canada to use detection dogs and thermal remediation for the successful eradication of bed bugs. In his free time, he is an avid gardener.