It's time again - for tick season! I just took care of one crawling on my foot after being in the garden for a short spell, and the cat has had a few already.

So here's your yearly reminder: If you are living in, or planning to travel to, a tick-infested region, go check if your vaccination against tick-borne meningoencephalitis is still up to date, and get it refreshed if it isn't.

Typical recommendations to avoid tick bites are to wear long trousers when outside in taller grasses or the forest, and check your body afterwards for any unwanted, unpaying temporary eight-legged appendages. Remove them with tweezers, or a special removal tool. We've tried a number of different tools over the years, and the best we've found is a tick removal lasso. Ours are from a Swedish company and called 3iX; they work much better than normal tweezers or even the special tick-removal tweezers. Sometimes you also find cards with slits sold as tick removal tools; I never got those to work on human skin, much less on cats with all the fur in the way. The lasso tool (Zeckenschlinge, for the German speakers here) does an equally good job on humans and animals, and works for all sizes of ticks, even the really tiny ones.

If you want to make sure the tick goes dead, you will need to squash it, cut it apart, pour boiling water over it, or burn it. It will happily survive being washed down the drain. (I wrote more about that here.)

I hope you'll have a good season with no tick bites!