Tick Prevention
What Are The Best Methods Of Tick Prevention?
Tick prevention tends to be first and foremost about education and understanding. Being aware of their behaviors, habitats, communicable diseases, and most opportunistic seasons for infestation. Ticks are rarely discriminatory about which blood source is available to them when it’s time for feeding and reproduction, though the blood of mammals is a hands down favorite. Tick prevention is most important during this frenzy of activity, when the arachnids are waiting quietly on trees, grass stalks, and bushes for the next easy ride to pass by. It could be a bear, a deer, your cat, or you. Whoever the lucky recipient is, the tick is set to sink his hooking mouthparts into the most tender areas of the skin and imbed his head for the utmost security.
If the tick is a female, she will engorge herself on your blood, so heavily that she could increase up to 600 percent in size. She will then deposit her eggs in the unlucky host before falling off of the mammal’s body and dying within 2 months of her own hatching. The larvae will feed freely on the blood of the host animal until it reaches the nymph stage before adulthood. This middle stage has proven to be the most dangerous to humans and house pets, as those ticks carrying harmful pathogens and disease are the number one cause of Lyme Disease in North America.
When thinking about tick prevention, it is best to employ several preemptive measures, as well as pesticides and thorough body inspections, upon suspicion of the presence of ticks. One of the very first tips is to try and steer clear of dense overgrowth and forests during the spring and early summer seasons, when the tick population is strong and hungry. If you have determined to trek out into the deep, try to stay as close to the path of least resistance as possible. The more remote and thick your path becomes, the more likely you are to contract a potentially diseased tick or two.
Your next best tool for tick prevention is to wear light colored clothing. Though this will not deter the ticks from choosing you, it will enable you to clearly see them against your clothing before they have a chance to get to your skin. Your clothing should also be tight and long in the sleeves and legs. Tuck your pant legs into your long socks, and this will help you to protect your skin against would be blood suckers. DEET is a great skin protector which repels ticks quite well. If you need something a bit stronger, permethrine can be used on your clothing, but never on the skin.