Ticked off ping.
Just about any neighborhood here in central Texas has a deer problem.(too many)
If these deer are carrying ticks (which they always seem to do) these neighborhoods are ripe for these diseases to spread.
Imagine your kids playing in a yard where the deer having been grazing/sleeping.
I don’t want the ticks, but I would like to have more of the deer in New Mexico. We have huge elk populations and small deer populations. I’ve heard of the elk carrying chronic wasting disease, but haven’t heard anything about tick related diseases.
It is bad in west Tennessee. It was not like this back in the 60s when I was a kid. The only ticks we would get on us were the big seed tick variety. Now with the “standing room only” deer population we have these teensy tiny ticks that you may not find on yourself for days afterward. I try to stay out of the woods unless it is a cold winter’s day.
How are these populations unnatural, are they being cloned? Or are we talking about too much human meddling and mis-management?
Not just deer, your pet dog or cat, the birds, cows are all carrying the tick and dropping them into your environment. Bantam chicken, guinne (?) hens will feed on ticks, also a perimeter spraying of your yard will do away with most of them. Yes, the teeny tiny ticks will give you Lyme’s disease, and winter season doesn’t kill them either. They burrow underground. Diligence will keep them away, frequent lawn mowing.
Dog collars don’t seem to be effective, but neither is culling a herd of deer, humans also can transport the tick. Duct tape with sticky stuff on outside of boots will catch them before you can, they are here in NJ too.
I’m not worried about the ticks, I’m worried about one of them killing me on the road!
bump
A few seasons of this should thin the deer out.
We are over run with deer here in Indiana County, Pa. And last year was the worst for ticks that I have seen.
We had a 9 year old girl killed last week when a dear when through the front windshield. And I have a good friend who totaled her car this weekend when she hit a deer.
Some years ago, I heard of a program in the Midwest, in a State with far too many deer. They had pretty much an open hunting season.
Then someone had the idea of keeping refrigerator trucks near the major hunting areas. If a hunter shot a deer, he could help himself to a few steaks, and they would pick up the rest of the carcass. With a freezer truck full of deer, they would take the meat for processing, then use it as food for the poor. It was a big help to charities.
I figure that an extra step could be used, to cook and process the meat for canning, including irradiating it to keep it from spoiling. What amounts to 10lb cans of deer Dinty Moore. Or just deer meat “au jus”.
Feed a lot of hungry people, cull the deer herds, and a lot less deer meat going to waste.
We hunters here in Kalifornia would be grateful for the chance to see a deer!
I would love to shoot one!