How to kill a Tick

It is tick season once again and that means we have been pulling ticks off of the dogs and ourselves. This also means we have been killing a lot of ticks

So how many ways can one kill a tick here's my list in no particular order:
cigarettes, a lighter, matches, a magnifying glass on a sunny day, drop it in alcohol, cut in half with finger nail clippers, cut with a knife, cut in half with scissors. Drop in soap water, drop in the toilet and flush, bite one in two (I do not recommend this!), feed it to a fish, feed it to a hen, feed it to a guinea hen, pull it's tiny head off, put it in a glass jar a lid and leave it there for a while, a long while. Smash it with a rock (especially good with the bloated ones), grind with a mortar and pestle. Fold it in half. Soak it with gasoline and light on fire (rather extreme but effective).

Ticks may seem indestructible but heat, cutting, smashing, drowning and being eaten by birds are all effective ways of killing them without using toxic (to us mammals) chemicals.

Got any other ideas?

It's Tick Season!

One of the gajillion ticks we have so far removed from various mammalian hides this spring

It's tick season here at Boulder belt Eco-Farm. Eugene and I have spent many warm moments with the dogs removing ticks from them for the past 10 days. It got warm and the littler critters got active and hungry. We find them on the dogs and on us. Would use toxic pesticides but they do more harm than good in the long and short of it. The treatments for the dogs are not very effective and they are expensive. We have used them in the past but questioned why we, as sustainable folk, would use such products. So this season we will not use poisons made by corporations of which we do not approve and control the ticks through more natural methods.

Nate looking at the hand holding yet another tick

Today we must have pick 40 or 50 off of the dogs. Nate is a tick magnet. It is easy to pull 10 or more off of him in a single tick removal event. Danny is second in tick magnetism. We get about 10 a day from his hide. He has long fine hair so it can be difficult to remove the vermin from his coat. hard to find them, for that matter. Nate with his short coat is easy to deal with. but also easy prey for the ticks. Arlo seems to be almost repellent to them. We have found one or two on him so far this tick season.

After we remove the ticks we burn 'em with cigarettes until they are dead. Probably have prevented a gajillion eggs from being fertilized, laid and hatched into larvae. And we will kill more BWAHAHAHAHAhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!