Ticks and their removal

Ticks are distant relatives of spiders. The adult form has a shiny grey globular body, almost about 1/2" long. It has eight tiny legs at the front end and a set of mouth parts which dig into the hedgehog's skin to suck blood. These rather nasty animals can be made to let go and drop off by touching their back with a burning cigarette. They can also be tweaked off with forceps, but this needs practice of you leave the mouthparts stuck in the hedgehog's skin. To avoid such a mishap leading to a septic wound, the skin should be swabbed with alcohol or disinfectant. Smearing the ticks with margarine, olive oil, or washing up liquid blocks their breathing holes. They then suffocate and drop off. Left alone, the ticks will feed on the animals hedgehog's blood for a while then drop off of their own accord, but it is best to kill them if you can to avoid their getting on to pets. One hedgehog may have several ticks on its body, but most have none. Sometimes young larval ticks may be found; small flat, orange-brown things. Unlike fleas these do not jump.

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Tick among spines



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Adult Tick

they make me shudder, especially that adult photo, horrible things! poor hoggy that is infested interesting post thankyou helen, great techneques to rid them! xx

Have to admit I am pretty good at it - with Diddy dog going down the rabbit warrens a lot, he comes out with a fair few even with being treated!!! I can remove them with my fingers and they take some squishing - copied Virginia and have a tick pot!!

i can imagine he gets a lot from his antics! lol think i would drown them, for some reason i hate crushing bugs! haha :S xx

Drowning is the tick pot method xx

Great post .. Helen , they are vile little creatures .x

I hate to contradict as your info posts are so good. But please don't burn ticks or put vaseline/oil on them. A stressed tick will regurgitate it's stomach contents into the hedgehog causing infections. The only safe way to remove ticks is to use a special tick removal tool which is like a hook or with tweezers, although the tweezer technique is very fiddly and I can't do it.

I appreciate any help on the posts - the whole point of them is to get as much information out their as possible and different people have written different things which makes it harder for me to make sure the information is correct.

Smoke or vaseline seems to pop up commonly and although I have never used this method myself, you could see somebody trying it.

Please remember, that if unsure, get any hedgehog in need of help to an experienced carer and they will remove the ticks.