The idea is to get the tick out intact and not leave anything behind, says Claire Duder, a veterinarian with the Centennial Animal Hospital in Bracebridge, Ont. (If there were no after-effects from Barney's encounter, the odds are you did that successfully.) Ticks anchor their barbed mouthparts under the skin to gorge on blood, because they need blood protein to grow and to hatch their eggs. Left behind, the mouthparts can cause a foreign-body reaction - usually nothing more than a mild irritation, Duder says.

A good pair of tweezers is the easiest tool for removal. Grasp the tick by the head, as close as you can to where the mouthparts enter the skin, and pull it away gently and steadily, then clean the entry point with a mild disinfectant.

The tick that attached itself to Barney is probably either a deer tick or a dog tick, says Jay Keystone, staff physician for the Centre for Travel and Tropical Medicine in Toronto. Despite widespread publicity about tick-borne diseases, there are practically none in Ontario, Keystone adds, though sporadic reports of Lyme disease (from deer ticks) have surfaced in the extreme southwestern part of the province.