Season of the ticks

Waffle had his first one of the season last week, a big, bloated monster of a tick, crabby and burrowing and repulsive and brutal.

I’m not sure why I detest ticks so much, or why they have such an impact on my mental health. But I do, and they do.

Take midges into consideration: Midges are an absolute pain in the rear end (and everywhere else) on those evenings when you’re trying to enjoy a barbecue or savour a sinking sun. They buzz around your face, stinging your skin, latching on, sucking your blood, only to be erased from time and space when you squish them with your swatting palms. Midges are the true H’s of the flying insect world and they have ruined manys an evening. And yet they’re nowhere near as loathsome as ticks. Ticks are in a hellish league of their own.

Imagine an insect, a parasitic arachnid no less, which latches onto your body as you’re meandering carefree through the fields. Then, not content as a midge might be to quietly stick a proboscis into an arm and have a wee drink, a tick will cut a hole in the skin and then burrow the whole of its face into and under, and dig in. The little buggers use what’s known as a hypostome, a calcified harpoon-like structure near the mouth area which allows them to anchor themselves firmly in place while gorging on blood. They are vampires excepting that neither daylight nor crucifixes faze them and they are hardly troubled at all when I announce, “The power of Christ compels you to let go!”

In horror film terms, midges are Gremlins. Ticks are an un-cut version of The Exorcist.

The other issue with ticks is that some, though not all, carry Lyme disease – a lovely potential by-product a person might look forward to after already suffering the trauma of a bite.

DEFENCE

Our anti-tick squad at home uses a two-pronged strategy when it comes to fending off attacks. First we use an anti-tick lotion from a crowd called Frontline. A few drops onto Waffle’s neck and he’s protected for a month or more. However since ticks skulk among the bushes from April to July (weather depending), we have to record when the Waff is dosed, so that he can be dosed again. And again.

However, as diligent as the anti-tick squad might be, you can be sure that a tick episode will arrive at some stage – as in last week.

The second part of the two-pronged strategy is itself, a duality. First the little humans will locate a tick during a snuggling or brushing session. The alarm is immediately raised and then I slide down a fireman’s poll into the middle of the melee armed with our in-house Tick-Tool.

The Tick-Tool is a little plastic implement with a narrow V-shaped wire on the end. This is used to trap the tick against Waffle’s skin and via a few slow turns the sickening arachnid is eventually pried loose.

This sounds nice and simple but if you’ve ever tried to remove a tick from a hairy hound, the tick dug in like Viet-Cong on acid and the hound bronco-bucking around like you’ve just told him the vet’s going to reverse his previous castration procedure, the process is far from easy.

Still, we’ve had a fair few ticks over the years and much like anything else, the more you deal with them the easier the dealing becomes.

Still, I can’t entirely shake my revulsion at the thought of these burrowing vampires. The worst scenario comes to pass if you try and rip the tick away, resulting in the body separating from the head, the latter segment remaining – hypostome and all – underneath the skin, pumping all its diseased poison into your dog. If that happens it’s a case of NEE-NAW-NEE-NAW back to the vet’s for a quick check that Waffle isn’t going to pop his hairy clogs.

All in all, these are the worst kind of vermin that nature ever suffered to craweth upon the surface of the Earth.

Remember the old fire service motto when it comes to dealing with burning buildings? It went something like this: Get out, get the fire service out and stay out.

When it comes to dealing with ticks your motto should be: Get the tick aff, don’t set fire to the surrounding countryside because you’re in a rage and have a drink.