Ticks  by John C. Street 

From the expression on her face I could tell Good Wife didn’t believe me. And I couldn’t blame her. If someone had told me they’d picked over twenty ticks off their dog after just a thirty minute stroll through the woods, I’d have been skeptical too. And I hadn’t even mentioned the five I’d plucked off my own sorry carcass. 

Anyway, the next day, just to make a point, I poured some rubbing alcohol into a small plastic cup and, upon returning from our morning walk, I collected the ticks the pups and I had accumulated and dropped them into the cup. Can’t remember how many I exterminated by the time Good Wife got home that evening but I do remember there were enough to cover the bottom of that little cup. And more than a couple of them had been tweezered off my own hide. 

I learned a couple interesting things as a result of this extensive exposure to these blood suckers, not the least of which was those canine bug repellents (the syrupy liquid kind you rub into the back of your pup’s neck) really work with only one minor glitch; it doesn’t actually repel ticks as much as it makes them want to get back off as quickly as possible. 

After a walk in the woods, therefore, I learned to leave the dogs on the front porch for half an hour and then go out with my cheater glasses and hemostats and pick the creepy crawlers off the top of my pooches’ noggins. Apparently, once they get a taste of Rover, the ticks climb to the highest point available – Rover’s head - so they can scuttle back to the first vegetation available in order to hitch a ride on a more palatable host. 

Another interesting – and imminently useful – lesson was that the highly touted procedures for removing ticks were, for the most part, ineffectual. Placing a dollop of fingernail polish or crazy glue on an attached tick makes it easier to remove their blood swollen abdomens but invariably leaves most of the critters head and mouth parts stuck in your hide, likewise those little plastic tick removers with the split in the side.  

Obviously, the easiest way to remove a tick is to get it off before it has dug in but if that is not an option, a good, pointy-nosed pair of hemostats – or plain old tweezers – is, in my non-medically trained opinion, the best option. Simply clamp down on the offending beasty, hold steady for a solid two-count and then pull them off. The joke around our house was that the two-count allowed the tick time to open its mouth to scream, thereby making sure that all the mouth parts came off cleanly. 

After the first couple days of dealing with this tick infestation, it became routine, upon returning to the house after a walk in the woods, to strip down to our birthday suits on the back porch, throw all our clothes in the dryer on high heat for ten minutes and head to the bathroom for a close inspection with a hand held mirror.  

Despite these efforts, however, on several occasions I ended up with ticks imbedded in my carcass and, before I learned to incorporate the two-count delay into the removal process, I left mouth parts in my hide. While my primary concern was contracting the dreaded Lyme disease, and I watched carefully for any of the symptoms, the worst thing that happened was that the bite-site continued to fester (due, I was told, to the digestive juices in the tick’s mouth) until I took a razor blade, sterilized it, and surgically removed the offending mouth parts.  

After living through this tick infestation for an entire summer and fall, it occurred to me there were a number of similarities between what I was experiencing and what Pennsylvania’s hunting community has been going through for nearly twelve years. And the fact that my tormentors were primarily “deer ticks” only added to the irony of these similarities. 

For nearly two years now, Mr. John Eveland – with yeoman’s assistance from Mr. Kim Stolfer and the rest of the Allegheny County Sportsmen’s League – has been documenting and publishing the mismanagement of the Keystone State’s deer herd. From every sector of the body politic (ranging from the state’s constitution to wildlife biology and from economics to societal concerns), Mr. Eveland has pulled the guts out of the Commission’s disingenuous arguments for the creation and continued persecution of the war on deer. 

Unfortunately, while he has done an excellent job of extracting the body of the Commissions’ arguments, he has left the offending mouth parts intact. And as my personal experience suggests, until the heads of this parasitic attack on hunting (i.e., the architects and practitioners of the programs defined by terms like “biodiversity” and “sustainability”) are surgically removed, the bite site will continue to fester and will not heal.  

Having failed to employ the two-count procedure (squeezing them until they scream) before attempting to extract these parasites from our body politic, we are left with but one option to heal the festering deer wars. 

There are plenty of razor blades available. The question is, does anyone in elected office have the courage to use them?