Where they are overrunning the place. And that seems to be a lot of places.
I haven't seen any deer ticks where I am in lower New York and this is Lyme Disease territory. Could be my bird feeders. I get various ground feeders including turkeys. Some people in the area keep Guinea Fowl.
Both my son and my dog has had lyme disease within the past 2 years. Both of them were pretty sick form it. Luckily with my son, we caught it immediately. My do probably had it for a long time because now he suffers with arthritis. It’s a terrible illness. There have been quite a few cases of lyme in our area. Our yards have become the norm for deer to run at night due to the thinning woods from development.
Birds are great for keeping the tick population down, chickens, guinea fowl, and others will thin them out some. Dry weather usually brings the critters on, it seems. In this case, the disease problem is not just the ticks, but the hosts. You need to break the chain somewhere, and thinning the deer herd can help put meat in freezers, if nothing else.
We have no huge excess of deer here, and this is shortgrass prairie, badlands, and farmland, for the most part. I have to give the State here credit for reasonable management practices which have kept deer populations under control, and which allow extra permits for farmers/ranchers who have serious problems with deer feeding on crops and forage, which helps the relatively easy availability of food from translating into too many deer.