Defining the concept of ‘tick repellency’ in veterinary medicine

Although widely used, the term repellency needs to be employed with care when applied to ticks and other periodic or permanent ectoparasites. Repellency has classically been used to describe the effects of a substance that causes a flying arthropod to make oriented movements away from its source. However, for crawling arthropods such as ticks, the term commonly subsumes a range of effects that include arthropod irritation and consequent avoiding or leaving the host, failing to attach, to bite, or to feed. The objective of the present article is to highlight the need for clarity, to propose consensus descriptions and methods for the evaluation of various effects on ticks caused by chemical substances.