Five Tips to Protect You & Your Dog from Ticks
These little buggers can give you life-changing illnesses
Tick borne infections like Lyme disease are a curse I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. I still marvel at how something so tiny nearly destroyed my daughter Fiona and changed our family’s life. That story is for another time, but with summer here and the outdoors beckoning, I wanted to share my top tick prevention tips.
Ticks have been called nature’s dirty needles for their ability to harbor and spread various diseases. While traditionally associated with hiking and camping, new research shows ticks are now in urban and suburban areas, including parks and backyards. Just last week, my daughter Fiona and her dog Herman went for a walk in San Francisco’s Presidio and found several ticks on Herman when they got home.
Why worry about the little buggers? Ninety percent of all diseases caused by bites (including mosquitos) come from ticks. The CDC reported in April that ER visits for tick bites are already way up in 2026. When I was growing up in Northern California in the 70s and 80s, we rarely saw ticks, but the explosion of the deer and mice population combined with warmer winters have turned ticks into the number one disease vector in the United States.
Lyme disease and Alpha-Gal (the meat allergy) are the best known tickborne infections, but there are many more that can be just as life-altering, including Babesiosis, Ehrlichiosis, Anaplasma, Bartonella, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, tularemia, relapsing fever, and Powassan virus. Ticks are present year-round in most areas, even in winter, according to the University of Rhode Island TickEncounter Resource Center.
Ticks are no longer just found in woody areas, but beaches, backyards and city parks. Make it a practice to perform regular tick checks whenever you spend time outdoors.
Prevention Is Key
The sooner you find and remove a tick the better your chances of avoiding infection. In the tick’s larval stage, it’s as tiny as a pinhead. Tick bites are painless and don’t generally itch like mosquito or flea bites, and not everyone gets a “bullseye” rash, so many people never know they’ve been bitten. It’s a good idea to have a tick removal kit in your car and one at home. It should include pointed tweezers and a small ziplock bag to save the tick for testing. Duct tape or a tick mitt is helpful to remove ticks from you (or change your clothes) and your dog before you get in the car. Remember that dogs (and outdoor cats) can carry ticks into your car and your house where they crawl around until they find you.
What to wear. Treat shoes, hiking boots, and socks with Permethrin. Ticks jump a ride and then crawl up until they find skin. July through September is prime tick hatching time. Look at this image of teeny tiny larval ticks crawling through the holes in sock fabric and you’ll forever convert to pre-treated socks. Insect Shield has some great pre-treated clothing. It’s better to look a little dorky than be saddled with a life-changing illness.
Permethrin-treated shoes or boots. No sandals.
Light-colored clothing (easier to see ticks)
Long pants (tuck them into socks) and long sleeves (tuck them into pants)
Long socks (tuck pants into them to keep ticks from climbing up inside your pants. These pre-treated socks aren’t expensive.)
Dogs: my daughter Fiona treats Herman with Credelio flea & tick chewables and sprays him with Vet’s Best Peppermint Flea & Tick Spray before walks. (Check with your vet before using any flea or tick repellants on your cat.) Herman is a light caramel colored McNab with short hair so ticks are pretty easy to spot on him.
Stay on open trails. Avoid walking through high grasses or sitting on grass, rocks, and trees, especially in shady areas. If you want to have a picnic, try one of these bug-repellant blankets.
Brush off any ticks you find crawling on you.
Don’t let kids play in leaf piles
Different ticks carry different diseases, but they are all invisible to tiny. www.tickencounter.org
Before you go home. It might seem excessive, but changing your clothes and bagging them before you get in the car will help keep ticks out of your car.
Use a tick mitt or duct tape to wipe off clothes (or change).
Dogs: Fiona wipes Herman down with a tick mitt before getting in the car. At home, she does a pet tick check and if she finds any, she bathes him with Skout’s Honor Flea & Tick Shampoo.
Dry, then wash clothes. At home, strip off outdoor clothes and put them in the dryer on high for at least 10 minutes. High heat has been found to desiccate ticks and a dryer run is a good way to kill them before washing those clothes.
Shower & tick check. Take a shower and perform a complete tick check on yourself. Ideally you will have a friend to check hard to see areas. Check:
Waist, bellybutton, and back
Groin and pelvic area
Scalp, hairline, and ears (behind and inside!)
Behind knees and in between toes
What to Do if You Find a Tick Attached
Symptoms of many tick-borne infections can initially appear mild, flu-like, and hard to distinguish from other illnesses. Most physicians aren’t trained to test for these infections as part of a general screening, so unfortunately detection is difficult and often delayed. Finding a Lyme-literate doctor is key to prompt diagnosis and treatment.
Carefully remove the tick by the head with pointed tweezers as soon as possible. Don’t squeeze the body or apply heat to the tick—this could cause it to regurgitate its stomach contents, including more pathogens, into you. Clean the area.
Place the tick in a ziplock bag and consider sending it for testing to see if it contains Lyme or other diseases. Tick Report, run by the Laboratory of Medical Zoology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst lab, does testing for $60-200.
Consult your healthcare provider, especially if you’re immune compromised, and consider a prophylactic dose of oral antibiotics. Monitor for several months for signs of possible infections.
Consider taking a photo of the tick (or any tick you find in your travels) and sending it to Tickspotters at the University of Rhode Island that has a huge crowd-sourced tick survey.
This all may seem like a lot of effort for a tiny creature, but rest assured, you’ll be protecting yourself and your family as best you can from potentially life-changing illnesses that are hard to diagnose and difficult to treat.
