Good to catch them early! Once they were half engorged I couldn’t get a grip on them and my hiking pals and I were trying to get them off by touching them with a hot lighter (like with ticks) and it wasn’t working. An old lady walking the other direction giggled as she was passing us and came up and showed me the quick way to get them off - just push your thumb nail-down against your skin and slide against their mouth end and they just kind of release and fall off. When they’re stuck on also with their back suckers you just do it to that end too. Thin trails of blood seepage for like half an hour before it clots up, no pain whatsoever. After a few bites I wasn’t afraid of them anymore.
Don’t use salt, fire or lighters on leeches. The leech is attached, gave you a light anesthetic, punched a hole through your skin to a blood vessel and now drinking the blood by sucking through the hole. When you use salt or fire in the leech, you’re shocking it with extreme pain which makes it vomit through the hole it’s sucking on … basically puking into your body. This has the danger of causing an infection or even a reaction to whatever was in the leech stuff that went back into your body.
Carefully and slowly pinching and nudging them is the safest way to get them off.
Once I was in some rock pool, wearing some old converse with holes in them because of the rocks.
I must have stepped in a nest or something, because when I took the shoes off I had like 50 tiny (like rice-sized) leeches on one of my feet.
Thankfully they came off easily.
Good to catch them early! Once they were half engorged I couldn’t get a grip on them and my hiking pals and I were trying to get them off by touching them with a hot lighter (like with ticks) and it wasn’t working. An old lady walking the other direction giggled as she was passing us and came up and showed me the quick way to get them off - just push your thumb nail-down against your skin and slide against their mouth end and they just kind of release and fall off. When they’re stuck on also with their back suckers you just do it to that end too. Thin trails of blood seepage for like half an hour before it clots up, no pain whatsoever. After a few bites I wasn’t afraid of them anymore.
I…am both horrified and grateful for your story.
Thankfully I don’t think I’ve had any that attached. I think salt also works to get them off/dry them out?
Don’t use salt, fire or lighters on leeches. The leech is attached, gave you a light anesthetic, punched a hole through your skin to a blood vessel and now drinking the blood by sucking through the hole. When you use salt or fire in the leech, you’re shocking it with extreme pain which makes it vomit through the hole it’s sucking on … basically puking into your body. This has the danger of causing an infection or even a reaction to whatever was in the leech stuff that went back into your body.
Carefully and slowly pinching and nudging them is the safest way to get them off.
Interesting. Good to know. I haven’t removed one with salt in decades probably, but I will remember this. Thanks.