Sentence:  The clapping they made on the concrete interrupted him in the ecstatic pleasure he knew , so that he quickly released his hold on the goat and pretended to be examining its haunches for <WSD>ticks</WSD> . 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  any of two families of small parasitic arachnids with barbed proboscis; feed on blood of warm-blooded animals