Tick on Your Dog: How to Remove It and What to Do for the Next Three Weeks

Grasp the tick with fine forceps as close to the skin as possible and pull it straight back with slow, steady pressure — no twisting, jerking or crushing — then keep the tick, note the date, and watch the dog for fever, lameness or lethargy over the following weeks.

How to remove a tick from your dog

The Companion Animal Parasite Council gives one method for removing a small number of ticks by hand, and every step of it exists to avoid squeezing the tick's contents into your dog.

Put gloves on first

CAPC says gloves should be worn to prevent zoonotic infection in the event a tick is inadvertently crushed during removal. The tick you are handling can infect you, not just the dog.

Grasp the tick as close to the skin as possible

Use fine forceps or fine-tipped tweezers and take hold of the tick right at the skin surface, not by its swollen body. Fingers do not do this job; they compress the tick.

Pull straight back with slow, steady pressure

CAPC's phrase is "directly extract using slow, steady, rearward pressure". Straight out, not up, not around, and without rushing it.

Do not twist, jerk or crush it

Crushing, twisting or jerking the tick out may result in increased host exposure to the pathogens inside it, and can break the mouthparts off in the skin, which may lead to granuloma formation.

Keep the tick and write down the date

Drop it into a sealable bag or a specimen tube — CAPC says ticks can be secured in tubes with or without alcohol for laboratory submission. Note the date and where on the body it was attached, because that is the information a veterinarian will want if the dog becomes ill three weeks later.

Why twisting is the dangerous version

Every folk method shares a mechanism: they irritate the tick rather than remove it, and an irritated tick has longer to do what it was doing.

Petroleum jelly, nail polish, a hot match and alcohol are not in any parasitology guideline for removing an attached tick, and none of them appears in CAPC's instruction. What CAPC does warn against is exactly what those methods produce — crushing the tick, and mouthparts left in the skin.

The second failure is subtler. A tick left in place while a home remedy is tried is a tick still feeding, and feeding time is what determines whether pathogens are transmitted.

If mouthparts do break off, that is a local wound rather than an ongoing infection risk, but a site that stays inflamed or forms a firm lump is worth having looked at.

The 24-hour rule is a Lyme rule, not a tick rule

This is the most repeated error on the subject, and CAPC states the correction plainly: the feeding time required for disease transmission varies between ticks and disease agents.

Specifically, Ehrlichia and Rickettsia species can be transmitted within 3 to 6 hours of tick attachment, while Borrelia burgdorferi — the agent of Lyme disease — can require 24 to 48 hours of feeding before a host is infected.

Rickettsia rickettsii is the cause of Rocky Mountain spotted fever, carried by American dog ticks and brown dog ticks; Ehrlichia canis is carried by the brown dog tick and Ehrlichia ewingii and E. chaffeensis by the lone star tick.

So "I got it off within a day" is real reassurance about Lyme disease and much weaker reassurance about the rickettsial and ehrlichial infections. Remove ticks on sight rather than on schedule.

What to do for the next three weeks

Nothing to the dog, and quite a lot of watching. There is no treatment given after a tick bite in an otherwise well dog, and no test worth running the next morning — antibodies take time to appear, so a same-week test mostly measures the past.

What matters is knowing the signs. CAPC's Ehrlichia and Anaplasma guidelines describe dogs presenting with fever, lethargy, depression, anorexia and weight loss, with some developing polyarthritis — stiffness, swollen joints or reluctance to move — and some showing pinpoint bruising or nosebleeds from a low platelet count. CAPC's Lyme disease guidelines add arthritis and renal disease as the presentations that matter there.

CAPC's diagnostic position on Lyme is that it is diagnosed on a combination of clinical signs, including arthritis and renal disease, and positive serology, and it recommends screening dogs for exposure to B. burgdorferi because endemic areas are expanding rapidly.

Call your veterinarian if any of those signs appear, and say when the tick was found. That date is a diagnostic clue, which is why step five of the removal is writing it down.

One tick means the yard has more

CAPC's headline recommendation for dogs is that all dogs should be treated year-round and throughout their life with tick-control products, and it is explicit that reactive or seasonal use allows home infestations to establish and permits disease transmission because products are often not applied until tick activity has already started.

Brown dog ticks are the reason for the strongest wording. CAPC notes home infestations with Rhipicephalus sanguineus, once established, may take several months to bring under control, and that the services of a licensed exterminator are necessary to eliminate the infestation from buildings.

Around the house, CAPC's habitat measures are mundane and effective: close-cut grass, no brush piles or leaf litter, limited ground cover near the house, plants that do not attract deer, and dogs kept on lead or behind a fence rather than roaming.

One rule is a safety rule rather than an efficacy one. CAPC states that acaricides must be used only in the species for which they are approved — dog products should not be given to cats, and cat products should not be given to dogs. The consequences of getting that wrong in a cat are covered in kitten flea treatment.

Tick prevention also does work a vaccine cannot. The 2022 AAHA canine vaccination guidelines recommend that Lyme vaccination be complemented with an ectoparasite control programme, because preventing tick feeding prevents disease transmission.

When a tick is an emergency

Weakness that begins in the hind limbs and ascends is the one that cannot wait. The Merck Veterinary Manual describes tick paralysis as an acute, progressive, symmetrical, ascending motor paralysis caused by salivary neurotoxins, and notes that severe cases need intensive care, with tick removal the intervention that changes the outcome.

Merck also records that severity does not necessarily track with tick size, number or duration of attachment — a small tick can produce it, and reports are more common in Australia than the United States, where Dermacentor species are the usual association.

Heavy infestations are the other emergency. CAPC notes that ticks can cause anaemia from blood loss, that highly infested animals can develop anaemia causing illness or death, and that secondary infection at attachment sites can lead to sepsis.

For a dog carrying hundreds of ticks, CAPC describes a fast-acting acaricide followed by manual removal of the remainder as more feasible than picking them off one at a time — a decision for a veterinarian, not for a home remedy.

What an urgent visit costs before anything is diagnosed is on our urgent care vet visit cost page, and the annual visit where screening happens is priced on vet checkup cost. Parasite control for cats runs on its own rules — see dewormer for cats.

What skipping this costs

This is not only a quality-of-life question. Where it ends in a veterinary bill, we publish the price of that bill from our own dataset rather than leaving the stakes abstract. These are the outcomes it leads to, and what they cost.

Using tick products seasonally, or only after finding a tick

Repeat infestations and the sick visit that a tick-borne infection turns into — fever, lameness or lethargy worked up as an urgent case. We price it at veterinary urgent care visit, $85 to $150 — $124 typical.

Ignoring a tick-borne illness screen at the annual visit in an endemic area

Exposure found late, when a dog with joint or kidney signs is already being investigated rather than screened. We price it at routine vet checkup (wellness exam), $56 to $130 — $66 typical.

Related guides

• deworming cats medicine — Cat dewormers are not interchangeable: roundworm drugs do not treat tapeworm.
• kitten flea care — Fleas can make a kitten anaemic, and dog flea products can kill cats.
• dhpp dog vaccine — DHPP, DAPP and DA2PP are the same core dog vaccine.

Every guide we have written is on the preventive care index.

Sources

1. Ticks Guidelines (canine) — Companion Animal Parasite Council (CAPC), 2023.
2. Lyme Disease Guidelines — Companion Animal Parasite Council (CAPC), 2025.
3. Ehrlichia spp. and Anaplasma spp. Guidelines — Companion Animal Parasite Council (CAPC), 2025.
4. Tick Paralysis in Animals — Merck Veterinary Manual, professional version, by Rhian B. Cope BVSc BSc PhD DABT DABVT, 2024.
5. 2022 AAHA Canine Vaccination Guidelines (JAAHA 2022;58:1-19) — American Animal Hospital Association, PDF hosted by Merck Animal Health, 2022.