Tics

What *are* you talking about? "Tics" are involuntary movements, or mannerisms.

snipped-for-privacy@netzero.com wrote in news:9e95f2f9-a63a-4a29-9e6e- snipped-for-privacy@w7g2000vbg.googlegroups.com:

Well, there is nothing wrong with spraying mannerisms.

But a tick is also a blood sucking and disease spreading insect. So all eridication methods are oke, the bloodier the better. Except of course if it is a mannerism. Pew... I am not sure if I understand all that......

Pick up some tick powder. Stuff works great!

--Winston

The historic approach, which causes the tick to release, instead of leaving its head attached to you... hold a lighted cigarette near it (ask any soldier who's done any stint in SE Asia). ...Jim Thompson

Yeah, I may need to do that however, I think I know where this tick came from.. I had a bag of sun flower seeds that my wife had gotten from some chinese area in NY the other day. I thought I may have saw something crawl out of the plastic bad when I untied the knot here at the bench.

Maybe it's a good thing it didn't bite me ;0

Jamie

When still living with my parents I've removed loads of ticks from our cats with a special kind of tweezers:

Grab and twist. I'm not quite sure but sometimes I had a feeling the cats looked me up to have the ticks removed. A lighter would not have worked well :-)

I once used a framing hammer to "squash" a tick on a linoleum floor, making a hammer-face-sized crater in the linoleum with the tick centered in it.

Little bastard levered up each leg in turn, then stood up leaving a tick-shaped dent in the crater.

Scared the crap out of me so I used a Bic lighter and was rewarded with a satisfying "pop".

Mark L. Fergerson

And they have the less than charming habit of passing on borrelia - Lyme disease.

The spirochete involved is similar to the one that causes syphilis, and has the same charming habit of settling down in a region of the body as a secondary infection. American borrelia has a penchant for the central nervous system, European for peripheral nerves. It only happens in about 2% of infections, but it's no fun for the unlucky few.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I'd go chemical: permetrin works great on any insect and is (relatively) safe for humans and any other animal with bones (except fish).

That reminds me of the time my sister was cutting off pieces of dung that were stuck to the long hair at the back end of our Angora.

She said, "Daddy, he keeps jumping when I try to cut this one off."

Yikes!

James Arthur

No, it isn't "also" since it's spelled "tick" and not "tic".

I thought he had a tic that required him "to jump from the bench over to my arm 2 times." I found that hard to visualize.

Freeze spray works well too. But if in the wild, you might blast that little sucker clean across the room from the spray pressure before you're able to apply a lethal dose. :)

Many years ago, I worked as a mobile radio tech for an RCC. We had an IMTS (Motorola Pulsar) and Secode Smart system - if anyone remembers those...

Anyway, one client owned a garbage truck company. I made the mistake of taking the radio control head into the screen room to work on it. When I got the cover off, hundreds of little bugs went everywhere!! And even though this room was a "real" screen room (i.e., not solid plate walls), it's a safe bet that if radiowaves can't get in, then those little bugs can't get out. I was killing them for weeks with cold spray. :) Got pretty good at it after a while....

And of course, from that day forward, all control head swaps were done in the garage!

A stick match works well. Light the match, blow it out, and then just touch the match head to the tic. It'll back right out. ;-)

I've since learned to use diatomaceous earth (available at feed & tack stores) for any kind of insect problem. At their scale it's jagged shards of glass but it's harmless to all vertebrates as long as it isn't inhaled.

Mark L. Fergerson

I got to be an expert at pulling ticks off our dogs in Tennessee. A pair of tweezers and drop the tick into a jar of oil. (Kept on the porch for just that job.) They had some medicine that would kill the tick in a day or so, but this way there wouldn't be dead ticks all over the indoor dogs mats and rugs.

I can live with ticks... but chiggers give me the chills. I can still see a 'clouds' of the little buggers climing up my pants legs. I'd come back from a walk with my pants off. And my wife would inspect me before I was allowed back into the house.

George H.

AHH!! TICKS!

When I first saw the header, I thought it was something to do with nervous twitches, a la Tourette's ;-)

It can't be a tick as they don't jump. It must be a flea!

They have developed a vaccine for that, but it does not work by the usual m= ethod of inducing neutralizing antibodies. IIRC this one induces a response= of lymphocyte migration to the site of the bite while it is occurring, to = be taken up by the tick where they kill the pathogen in vivo.=20 Only certain types of ticks carry the disease, originally it was the micros= copic sized deer ticks, about as big as the period, . , on the printed page= . This means no one over 45yo can even see the tick unassisted by a microsc= ope. The larger ticks don't support it for some reason.