by Larry Wayne

Created on: September 02, 2008   Last Updated: December 08, 2009

A 21st century experiment worked first try. It was a lucky guess. Ticks can be removed almost as easily as picking up nails with a magnet, sometimes. Prior to this discovery, live and learn, some of the out of date techniques listed here have been tried for removing ticks. (1) Pull a tick out with you fingers, just grab it and pull. That is one way to get a tick out. (2) Light a match, blow it out, and touch the rear of a tick with a hot match to entice the tick to release its bite and back out. (3) Get a pair of tweezers and pull it out. This appears to be the most common way to get a tick out. (4) Just scratch it off and hope it does not itch or cause an infection afterwards.

All of the above remedies have been used, successfully, on some occasions, and may your tick removing technique work, for your pet's sake. These remedies are old ideas like pulling a tooth by tying a string to a concrete block and tying the other end of the string to your tooth or getting out a pair of pliers and getting that tooth out.

After being given a cat, it was soon discovered, the cat had bleeding ears. About 20 ticks were in each ear. As luck would have it, a can of Marvel Mystery Oil was close by. I decided to coat the inner ear with Mystery Oil. After about one minute I noticed how easily the ticks were removed. A cue tip for cleaning ears is an excellent tool for the job. The Mystery Oil apparently causes the ticks to release their bite. Just lay the tick horizontal to the body and ease them out. Dispose of them into a container of some kind. Mystery Oil is a product sold at auto parts stores. It is about as gentle to the skin as baby oil and only slightly more toxic.

Tweezers can be used but it's not as easy with tweezers to get the feel that the tick has released its bite. Tweezers may be needed to dig ticks out of heavily furred areas of pets. I never use tweezers. To get ticks out of the a fur of an animal, pour some Mystery Oil on the tick and surrounding area. A comb is my tool of choice. For small ticks use a fine toothed comb. For ticks larger than deer ticks, use a comb with wider spread apart teeth.

Some say any oil or alcohol applied to a tick will agitate it and cause it to inject its stomach contents back into the host. I disagree. Mystery Oil is not painful to the skin, just as hydrogen peroxide is not, under normal circumstances. In a sensitive skin area with a lot of germs present, peroxide will be more painful than Mystery Oil. Further more, I have never seen

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