Ticks can be hard to spot, but if spend a significant amount of time outside with your pet, you need to spot check both yourself and your pet. Some ticks carry Lyme Disease, but you don’t have to ban yourself from the outdoors or pollute your skin and the air with toxic bug sprays.

First, be aware of the outdoors. Ticks often cling to tree branches and tall grass. So maintaining your lawn’s short length and putting the brush in the woods or compost bin can prevent you and your pet from getting in contact with a tick. However, you may not always be walking or playing in your backyard.

Regularly checking for ticks and removing any with tweezers is the best prevention. Although any tick can carry Lyme Disease, it’s more common for the black-legged (a.k.a. dear tick) type to carry it. The disease causes fevers, swollen joints, poor appetite, swollen glands and leg pain. If you fail to treat the disease, it can affect your dog’s vital organs such as its heart and kidneys.

There are tick-killing products available, but choose ones that contain pyriproxyfen if you can because it’s a safer chemical. However, products with fibronyl, permethrin and amitrax can be used sparingly. When looking for a tick product for your pet, it can be challenging, because most of them contain chemicals, which are harmful to the environment and can potentially cause health problems for your pet.

An eco-friendly product that you can use on your lawn to kill ticks is Damminix Tick Tubes. Tubes of cotton balls contain permethrin, which is a milder pesticide. The cotton balls attract mice who use the material for their nests. When the mice carry the product to their homes, it kills the ticks that live off of the mice.

Combating ticks without the harmful chemicals is an eco-friendly choice, and more options are becoming available. Before purchasing a tick-killing product, read the ingredients and look them up online if you have to. Every once in a while you may need to resort to the chemicals, but lean toward milder ones.