What's With All The Ticks and How Should Hunters Prepare? Dr. Grant Woods

Take Aim Adventures Podcast: Rather than use a an insecticide which can harm ticks but also a lot of beneficial creatures, why not convert that to not good tick habitat? What what have you guys seen as the best way if you're going to new territory where you can't control the habitat on public land or something? Yeah. ⁓ what are the best ways to keep ticks off of you? The first word I see laying prostrate with ten or twelve people around me all murmuring and talking and jabbing me and doing stuff is spongiform. And I'm thinking I'm the first human to ever get CWD. Such a cool deity. Well you did it again! ⁓ Welcome to the Take Aim Adventures podcast. Today we're joined by Dr. Grant Woods and ⁓ we're gonna have a fun conversation today about ticks. And ticks is something that's kind of seems to be on everybody's radar right now. And even in our area in Michigan, it seems like there didn't used to be so many. And and now it seems like they're everywhere and just there's so many people talking about it. So I mean for a while there you'd go on a hunt and you'd you would laugh at the guys in Missouri or Texas and stuff like that and say, Hey, those guys are wrestling with ticks. You'd see some pictures of the deer. That are inundated with ticks and go, I'm glad I live in Michigan. Yeah, we don't have this problem. And then my granddaughter came in last week into the house and my wife and I are talking. We look at her and she has this little black spot on her arm. And we're like, What is that? And in my eyes, I it looks like she just got something dirty on her and pulled out my camera and took a photo of it and then blew it up and shocked and went, You gotta be joking. It's a little teeny tick burrowing into my granddaughter. So now it's war. Yeah. And ⁓ so we're we're we're taking them off. Kill ⁓ all. But ⁓ I I understand a little bit of your background, Grant. It would be nice if you just talked a little bit about your education and and and your background. And then you know, my side of it is it's amazing what a guy will do to get a helicopter ride. Yeah. And ⁓ I'd love to have you kind of talk about that a little bit because that that is just really shocking, ⁓ of what what you've been through because of a tick. Yeah. So ⁓ Yeah. Hey, thanks for having me on. Such a pleasure to be with you guys this morning. ⁓ and I'm talking y'all from the Ozark Mountains in southwestern Missouri. Many listeners I'm sure have heard of Branson, Missouri. And I can hear one of the theme parts, train whistles from our ranch here. So we're next to Branson, Missouri. ⁓ and it's For those not familiar with the Ozarks, our our mountains, our hills go up about eleven, twelve hundred feet, and valleys are four or five hundred feet below that, but pretty steep where they are. So we're hilly or mountainous country, all timber, no wag. and I was raised in this area, went off to school, schooled locally, ⁓ just because I'm the first guy in my family to go to college and knew early on I wanted to work with deer. And I don't remember this part of the story. I remember I was in first grade right for Christmas. Back then we used to get snow. And there was about three inches on the ground, and my dad and I had built some little rabbit traps, little rabbit gums, if you're familiar, out of old scrap barn wood. And I had to do chores every morning, race on the farm. And after chores, I got to run my trap line, if you will, before school bus came. And one morning I found right before Christmas break, I found a female fawn. Now there were no deer in the county, and I'd heard at a barbershop or somewhere that they're gonna restock deer. So that just got in my brain. And ⁓ I found a female fawn that had been shot in the head. And I I really believe at that moment God built me to be a deer biologist, because guys my age, I'll be sixty five here in a couple days, ⁓ wanted to be in the army or be a policeman, be a farmman, all very honorable professions. I just wanted to work with deer. There was no term deer biologist. I was I guess the word might be fantasize about seeing a living deer. That's how rare they are that you would fantasize about seeing a live deer. And just kept following that path. So I ended up going to school at University of Georgia and Clemson, finishing my PhD there just to work with deer. I I'm not schoolie. I wasn't great in school. It was just the only way to time I could figure out how to work with deer. You know, getting paid minimum wage and just chasing The next deer project. Just biology or was it really narrow? No, no, no. They actually had ⁓ at Clemson had a degree called Forest and Wildlife Resources. My lead professor was Dr. Dave Gwynn, but Doctor Larry Marks and some other great people in the deer world at different universities actually were on my committee. And it was a hard committee 'cause these were the best of the best and they had spected a lot and they didn't They weren't necessarily again at my university, so they wanted to show that their university was better, so they were really grinding on me. In hindsight, my professor, Dr. Gwyn, did me a great favor because he got me. This sounds bad, but recognition with these other leaders in the profession. That was his plan. At the time, I thought, boy, that guy doesn't like me. He's really wanting to punish me. But in hindsight, he was exposing me to the best of the best. So it was a great thing. And And then while I was in school, I was at good for ⁓ blessed with great parents. My mom's still alive at ninety-five and just raised right. ⁓ and so in in during that PhD program, I'm old enough, you paid nickels for copies and a nickel for pencil from the secretary's office. And some of the other grad students would go in at lunch or they're on break and steal those candidly. And I I didn't. I'd leave my nickels, you know, on their desk or whatever, so they like me. And I they would smaller timber companies would call them and say, Hey, you know, we we think we can charge another quarter an acre for a deer lease. You know, they may own a hundred thousand acres or something if we could put some food plots in or whatever. So I started consulting and my professor got at odds with the dean somehow. I went involved in that. I'm not very politically oriented. And got put on the football parking lot committee. I'm like, you know, I I'm telling you, any any freshman in the engineering department knows more about traffic flow than any wildist at any age. I mean that was clearly a clearly a punitive action. And I said, I I couldn't even imagine that. Again, I'm not politically oriented. I'm just a hard worker. And I was already consulting and making about as much money if as I was going to make as an associate professor. So I said, well I'm going to stay consulting for a couple of years and then I'll go back to school. And here I am 36 years later. So that's kind of my My backstory. I I've chased deer, love deer. Daniel just got back from New Zealand. Y'all know Daniel well and I've worked in New Zealand and we work in Canada and work all over. And last week I was working in a very pleasant place. I was working in Oregon on a black tail deer and elk project, just out two hours south of Portland, just up the mountain from the Willamette Valley, and there were no ticks. And I asked the landowner. Said, you know what I need to bring, I do, you know, ⁓ ticks. And he said, there's no ticks. And I didn't believe him. I said, I haven't worked anywhere in many decades. There's no ticks. There's no ticks here. So I did not wear my treated clothes or whatever. And all day long walking through knee-tall, waist-tall grass, beautiful elk property. Which on an elk property, it means there's a lot of grass because elk are grass eaters. It's not dark timber. That's not elk habitat, folks. That's what you see on the video. Elk. Got to feed a lot. They're a big animal. These are Roosevelt elk. So they, you know, they weigh 800,000, 900,000 pounds. These are not Rocky Mountain elk. These are the biggest elk in North America. And ⁓ just all day busting that habitat and did not get a tick on me. I could not believe it. When I got to the hotel and cleaned up that night, I was like, ⁓ my gosh, I'm moving to Oregon. This is amazing. Yeah, I've been to Missouri ⁓ one time we went there a couple years ago, dropping off some blinds, and it felt like you step out of the truck. And all of a sudden you have a tick on you. It's just insane. That's exact that was my first time I ever had a tick was actually visiting you in Missouri for a video. I literally stepped out of the car, two steps away, looked down, and I had a tick crawling up my leg. And that was the first time I've ever had a tick on me. Cause I mean, until the last four years, I mean Michigan's been pretty tick free my entire life. And then I don't know what's going on exactly, w whether the winters were just softer or something, but Around here we're finally starting to get ⁓ I mean, this last year was really bad, and this year we're hearing about it all the time. Now everyone's being really concerned about the Lyme disease, Alpha Gal. I mean all the s diseases that come with dealing with ticks, but I mean You know, as as we sorry, as we sit here right now, our lead editor Toby does great work. He he's a big outdoors person, rock climber, adventure, all this stuff. Camps, I don't know, twenty weekends a year, has alpha gal. Yeah. He's lost fifteen pounds, so that's not fun, right? No, I can't imagine saying I can't have a steak tonight. That's exactly what be worried about. So tough. ⁓ And her she does a lot of habitat work with her dad and her and other members of her family have alpha gal. So I personally probably know a hundred people that have alpha gal, literally. Literally. RFK is saying this accurately when he says this is a coming epidemic in America. It is serious, folks. It is don't take this lightly. And there's some really good scientific reasons why ticks populations are Expanding both in prevalence and distribution. Just kind of curious for your guys' area on that, as a from someone from Michigan and we're all everyone's trying to figure out how to keep the ticks down in their areas. I mean, people are spraying their yards and stuff. Do you have any like feedback on like effective ways to try to control stuff in an area? I mean, it was not never a aspect that I ever had to think about before until recently. So I'm just kind of curious from your perspective. Yeah, i it's I think our society overall wants to complicate everything. And I'm just a simple hillbilly, man. I like stuff simple. I like to get to the bottom line as quick as we can. And so all creatures are a function of their habitat. And if you're in a a third world Saharan desert country, and and you're An average person there, you're probably not thriving like a guy in Michigan, right? You've got plenty of food, there's a convenience store in the corner, no one's trying to kill you in most places in Michigan. Well, ticks are the same way. So our climate, I'm I'm not a big I'll be real, you know, I'm not an Al Gore fan. I'm not a big guy, like the world's going to handbasket, but I think our climate has always done this. Yeah. Right? There's no doubt about that. When we look at tree rings and stuff, I don't just think that. I mean, I know this. This is based on science. Our climate has always done this. I'll tell you quick, funny. Years ago I was in Alaska, family vacation, and my wife had told me, leave work at home. And we're in a national park, we're taking a tour, and there's some famous glacier that had retracted a long ways and it and and some fur trappers had found it and noticed so there were signs from sometime in the late 1800s to current. Every ten years they put a sign where the front of the glacier was. I mean, like a wall. You could physically see where the glacier was. So we start walking this trail, and little girl in the green National Park uniform, who'd probably never been outside before she had that job, is leading it, and she's all about climate change and humans are evil and all this stuff. And I notice we're walking quite a ways between signs, and then they get close together, and then they get pretty far apart, and now they're close together again. We get to the last one and And she's about how evil we are and you know, and I'm not gonna go into all details. And I could and my wife sees me. I'm I'm kinda getting an hand on me trying to keep me quiet. I finally raised my hand, you know, and she didn't have any idea who I am and I get her attention and I say, you know, I noticed that we walked a long way between signs a few places and then they were closer. But back there where we started, there were no gasoline engines in Alaska. There was no manufacturing in Alaska. People were killing a seal and and putting a you know a skin or the wigwam to stay warm. How come those signs were so close together in that period? Which totally deflated the whole argument, right? I mean just totally by her own definition. Yeah, she wasn't happy with me. My wife wasn't happy with me. There was no ice cream for supper that night. It was a bad night. So I just share that that let's calm down before we s yell the sky's falling. Yeah. And stick to simple biological principles. And when you make the habitat better, we all were a lot of us work to make habitat better for deer or turkey, so we can maybe see more or larger critters where we hunt. Well, the temperature is in a little bit of a warming trend in many areas. We're not getting quite as much snow in many areas. And in Michigan in particular. In a lot of areas throughout the Whitetails range, deer populations are very high. There's a few pockets or not, but overall deer population is really high. So that's like putting a convenience door all throughout the Sahara. There's more food for ticks than there used to be. And prescribed fire or fire use is down in many areas, so there's a big thick leaf or needle layer. And ticks need two things. They need a lot of food, more deer, a lot of food. And They must stay moist. If they desiccate, they die. I'm talking on the outside and inside. So when we have lack of fire, more shade, less timber harvest, more needles, more leaves, that's ideal tick habitat. We don't need to make it any more complicated than that. There's more tick food and more tick houses. And those of us that do a lot of prescribed fire. Like on the sided ranch where I'm sitting right now, we have nine hundred acres. Man, it's by my house. My house is here, my office here, there's separate buildings. I mean, we burn a lot. You know, I'm like pyro maniac. The neighbors calling all the time. What's wrong with that guy? I mean, we we burn a lot. And I wouldn't I would walk out my office through the woods here without treated clothes and probably not get a tick. I mean, we you know, it it's we burn to have fresh food. My house is right up the hill from my office. I want to see Deer Lot and I want to hear turkeys a lot, so we keep that habitat really well, which in our area means a lot of fire and new growth. On the back side of ranch, where I don't get as much, like my wife, my daughter and I, excuse me, just went swimming in our creek. A creek goes to our property the other day. I haven't burned there in probably five years, and I knew it'd be ticky. So I drove the buggy like as close to the creek bank as I could get, maybe three steps away. There was a tree in the way, or I would have drove it in the creek and stepped out. And we got ticks in those couple of steps. Wow. Lack of fire. Interesting. So what I'm hearing is we need to we we need to shoot some more does in Michigan, see, and do more prescribed fire. See, this is what Daniel was telling us before. One buck tag. This means shoot more bucks and does. No. ⁓ so Grant, when it comes to like practical stuff for people can do, of course, that's the hunting side and kind of managing your property. I is there s practical, simple steps you can do for your yard and your pets and Yeah, you know, I mean I would certainly mow my yard a little shorter than normal. Again, ticks desiccate, so if the s ticks don't like where the sun's hitting. They're like vampires. You put some sun on the ground, ticks don't want to be there. And I'm not talking bare ground, but you know, your grass is three inches tall, not six inches tall. Okay. That's not very good tick habitat at three inches tall. If you got a pile of leaves in the corner or you've let you know ⁓ the back acre of your lot or whatever grow up gnarly and ticks are an issue, rather than use a an insecticide, which can harm ticks but also a lot of beneficial creatures, why not convert that to not good tick habitat? And again, every creature on this planet thrives or goes down based on their habitat for us, of what we put in our body or the stress we're carrying or whatever it is, right? And the same is true with ticks. So and you could have a perfect yard and your neighbors has got a junk pile and so ticks are getting on your place. And, you know, there's been collars forever, or now little pills you give your pets. You don't want your pets bringing ticks in the house. So you certainly want to treat your pets. And by the way, I'll just say this ⁓ this is gonna be controversial, but I'll say it, you know, ivermectin is the most prescribed medicine for humans in Africa. ⁓ it'd been that way for decades. Literally, that's a big Africa's a big continent, guys. And and that's because so many humans there have internal parasites. Well, most of these pet medicines are based around ivermectin. Very safe. Ivermectin is a very safe drug. I'm not, you know, one is ivermectin wild solves covalent oil. I'm just saying for ticks, ivermectin is a very safe drug. Very safe. It's illegal to give ivermectin to wildlife, to deer. That's illegal. ⁓ so I won't go there. But for your pets or your livestock, whatever, it's a very safe medicine. There's some new formulations of ivermectin coming out that's even less damaging to the environment. And and I think that's probably where RFK is going. ⁓ I don't know that. But anyway, takeaway the tick habitat. There are sprays you can use. I've never used them because, like around my yard, buddy, I'm dropping a matching time. It's dry. And if there's fuel and it's dry, it's gonna be in burnt. Because I don't want ticks in my yard. And I've never had a tick in my yard. But I just make sure there's no tick habit habitat within, you know, a reasonable distance from my house. What what are some practical steps which for guys that aren't used to ticks or starting to get used to ticks, or let's say a guy from Michigan goes to Missouri on a hunt, what what have you guys seen as the best way if you're going to new territory where you can't control the habitat on public land or something? Yeah. ⁓ what are the best ways to keep ticks off of you? I I mean I there's all the old wives tails, sulfur on your socks, whatever. I've tried all that stuff and you still get ticks. So I think there's only really two practical techniques. You can spray your boots, your socks, your clothes with permethrin, ⁓ which is a synthetic synthesized or man-made pheromone of a flower. That's what that is. It's not some, you know, boy, we whipped this stuff in some chemistry lab somewhere in the deep dark world. ⁓ I've did that for years. I don't like spraying all the time. I don't like getting a spray on me. I get lazy and it's been too long since I sprayed my blue jeans and I go out working, I get ticks all over me. Yeah. So I personally have switched to a a product called a Lumetic and it's just clothing that's treated and it will last until the closer out. I have and all my employees wear it. Everyone wears it. I get it for everyone. 'Cause I I don't want my employees or people I care about getting sick. I've had that experience. So and and by the way, I I've had a really bad experience with ticks and then back in those days I was just spraying. You know, I would get we would buy permethan by the case and I'd spray my boots and spray my jeans, leave ⁓ out in the sun for a day, so it'd really bake into the cotton. It it bonds to cotton. ⁓ and then I just realized I was getting lazy and not treating enough or What or we'd run out not ordered spray, so we go a week before we get it, whatever. So we just started buying the pre treated clothing and we literally went my staff, if they were in here right now, they tell you we common to get fifty a hundred ticks a day. Common. We keep duct tape and all of our pickups and U T Vs, so when you get in a bad batch of ⁓ you take the duct tape and pat ⁓ off you. No. We think we have bad ticks if we see one in a week. Wow. No, we could I so we do as scientists what we exhale is what attracts ticks and mosquitoes. Common knowledge. So when you melt dry ice, it's the same thing CO2 as we exhale. So to do surveys in area how bad ticks are, because ticks are a big killer of fawns. People don't realize this. And areas like here and areas where a fawn is laying still and And breathing in the same spot the first two weeks of his life, you know, on average, every fawn's different, but on average they're gonna lay in one spot for about two weeks and the doe's gonna come, let it feed, and then go back off so it d not attracting predators, and it's exhaling. So to replicate that, we take about a pound of dry ice, we put on a meter square of being scientists on white plastic, the white plastic's only so we can see the ticks easy. And leave it for X most scientists use three hours. And it's common to get five or six hundred ticks in three hours. ⁓ my gosh. That's incredible. Could you imagine what what what you're thinking when you're you crawl into the turkey hunt and you crawl up into the brush and you're sitting on the ground and you're there for ⁓ an hour calling and being you are on very realistic, Dan I mean, Daniel and I've done this for decades here, right? It's very realistic if you do that with untreated clothing where there's thick leaf litter. To have two or three hundred ticks on you. That's incredible. How I can imagine. They may not be stuck in you. They may I'm gonna make this clear, they may not be in you already, but they're call calling on your skin or your on your clothing or whatever. Right. From a like the scientific perspective, I don't know like if people know this, but like how far away can ticks like smell that, if you will? Like do they get attracted from pretty far or like it's it's amazing. Fifty a hundred yards. Fifty a hundred yards. That's that's incredible. You think about those little legged rascals moving to you, right? Right. But they're they're wanting a blood mill. They have to have a blood mill to mature to their next life stage. They have to have it. They have to have it. So what they do in reality is they crawl up grass. This is why grass or unkept ears are so bad. And they do there's a scientific name for them, I'll say it, but they kind of hold on with one side and their other legs on their side are reaching out, grabbing it, trying to grab something going by. Yeah. Yep. So That's why they get on you, right? And you're you're exhaling so they go, Man, here comes a blood mill or you're sitting there turkey hunting and you're all excited, like at least I am. I mean, you hear it gobble, it's right at the ridge, so I'm probably breathing hard and I'm getting all excited and yanking on that call. And the t I'm just exhaling a ticks and going, Man, there's a hundred and seventy pound blood mill over there. I'm rushing to it. They're getting as excited as you are about the turkey. It's just a it's just in regard how yeah. Like, yeah, keep calling him, keep him still. We're we're we're almost there. Hey, you know what? They probably pay to turkeys. You just stay over there another thirty minutes, man. Just stay on that ridge another thirty minutes. Exactly. Yep. Hey, let's dispel one myth while we're here. A lot of people say we trap critters to that that are nest raiders in an effort to get more eggs to become poles and more poets to become adult turkeys. It's very successful. ⁓ but there Years ago there was a myth that possums eat four thousand ticks a day and don't ever kill a possum 'cause they're vacuuming ticks. And I'm thinking it was a girl that did that research from New York, and I'm thinking, Honey, there's a ton of possums in Missouri and if you step off a truck here as you guys have testified, you're gonna know what ticks are. I don't think that's working. Well it turns out some researchers in Illinois said, like me, That don't make sense based on years of just working in the field and observations. So it turned out she dumped X amount of ticks in the possum crate to grow in New York. Literally, literally, folks, I'm not I'm not stretching this one. And come back the next morning and the ticks are gone. She's like, ⁓ my gosh, that possum made all the ticks. And I'm thinking all her coworkers went home with ticks, man. And so the people in Illinois did it differently and they actually looked and they did it a couple different ways, fed possums, picked up roadkill possums, all this stuff, looked in their digestive system. There are no ticks in there or very few ticks in there. That that was bad research that got published. That was really bad scientific research. We've had a lot of discussions about this on our side too. Eat turkey eggs, I mean, when they can. I mean you don't you don't see possums walking around with their tongues out everywhere trying to like lick at ticks, whereas, you know, birds you see a peck, peck, peck, peck, peck all day log, you know. Yeah. Everyone sees turkeys grooming, reach around grooming. They're mainly getting mites. Turkey get mites, but they also get ticks. And if you've skinned many turkeys, if you've actually took the time to skin them or plucked them. They may have a tick or two of them, but not many. And my gosh, those feathers would be like a tick magnet. They're like velcro going through the woods for ticks to jump on them. So I would rather have a turkey eating ticks than a possum that might eat a few ticks and also eat turkey eggs. So yeah. Possums in season on my place. And I have a before I get hate mail, because I'll get hate mail, but I we've shown it on our show before. I can send y'all pictures, but I've had a beautiful throw made out of possum hide for my wife. And people go, ⁓ my gosh, it possum fur if you never felt like mink, man. It is so smooth. Yeah. So smooth. And the reason I had a possum fur made, because back in the day, I trying to be the big Yukon trapper man, I sent 60 Samad Coon pelts and seven coyote pelts to have a king-size blanket made for my wife for Christmas sake. And you know, I'm gonna be the provider, this is gonna be great. Yeah. Captured off our land, trapped off our land. Get that baby back right for Christmas, and I am feeling like the man. I mean, I have provided. I am Conan, the mountain man, providing this beautiful thing. I'm very family oriented, so don't worry. But so that Christmas night, we whip that baby out on the bed. I mean, they are they do great work, right? And this thing is stunning. And we whip it out on the bed and we get on a Christmas night. And we're in there like two minutes so we kick that thing off. And I've never slept on it again because it's too hot. I need to ship it to Alaska because in Missouri there's not a night in a house you can sleep under that thing. It's wall art now. It hangs up, it's wall art. You can't sleep under it. That's why I went to Possum, because Possum Hide does not hold heat. And you can have a beautiful fur piece in your house that you're gonna leave on a couch as a throw or whatever and use it because it's it doesn't retain near as much heat. That's interesting. Yeah, I never knew that. That's like ⁓ everyone's like they're just giant rats. So how don't just like get ⁓ and get ⁓ out. Another question too, Grant. So like a lot of people are like, Well, if you get a tick on you and it starts burrowing a little bit, like, when do you need to be concerned? If you get a tick on you, like if it's is it like six hours, twenty four hours before you have to concerned? And is it different for Lyme disease versus alpha gal? Those are great questions, and there's conflicting research. So I actually had to go to the hospital because of tick-borne illness. So when I kind of come around, Lily came through, I was out for a while. I asked the doctor that and he says there's a lot of variables. The the answer is you want to get them off as quick as you can. Most diseases you got six or eight hours to be super safe. The tick that sent me to the hospital, I was working in Alabama. About an eight hour drive from here. We finished and I said, I don't want to spend another night in a hotel. Let's just drive home tonight, guys. So got in at two or three AM, took a shower, apparently missed a tick, and a few days later started getting a fever and it went really downhill from there. So in that case, that tick was probably on me. Depending on what time of day I got at working in the field in Alabama, you know, and took a shower, eight to twenty hours, some somewhere in that time frame. I don't know, but it it certainly was on there long enough to knock me for a loop. So When you get a tick, even more important, you want to get them off as soon as you can. Let's just leave it at that, because there's no magic number. Sooner's better. And you don't want to grab it like everyone does by the body and pull it off. All you're doing is squeezing that tick and giving yourself an injection of everything in its digestive system. Yeah. And the things that make us sick are living in that tick's digestive system. So when you grab that tick body and just squeeze it, or you see it on your granddaughter and say, Honey, let me get the squeeze I can, you grab it. You can't physically grab it by the head with our old fingers, right? So you're just giving an injection to whoever that tick is on. So you wanna take really fine, really small, fine, fine tweezers and kind of slide it into a tick's body, pick it up and just get get just the head part. So you're not giving yourself an injection or they sell cards now that hunters can take in the woods, like almost like a credit card or something. Yeah. It's got a little V in there and you just slide it coming from behind the tick, not forward but coming behind it, so you lift the body up and it goes to a really narrow V and you just pop that tick off there. Yeah, I've seen people selling those as little wallet carriers that you can put ⁓ in there and then just have it always on you to pop those off. But those those were Yeah, I think that's a brilliant idea. I personally don't have one. I need one. I gotta tell you, once we started wearing the treated clothing, I I've not had a tick stuck I've had a tick on my pants. I've not had one buried in me yet this year. So what what are you wearing? I mean how how treated? Are you talking about socks and and and pants or or I I I wear my standard boots I wear every day and I do treat my boots. They don't sell boots that are treated. That'd be messy, right? All everyone's got a different brand of boot they like, whatever I I treat my boots. They do sell socks, which is the main thing, and pants and shirt, and that's that's what we wear ever our staff out in the field wears them every single day. We get everyone here has three or four pairs, you're not doing laundry every night and I mean we're running chainsaws, they're you know, they're getting dirty, they d ours don't look too good 'cause we wear ⁓ so much. But after many washings off we're not none of my staff's getting ticks. None we're just not like we're happy. We can be out in the woods again and enjoy it. I can take a walk in the summer and enjoy it. And that's a limitick. I I'm just telling you what we wear. And they're E like eliminate, elimitick and I can't imagine doing my job without them. I can't imagine that anymore. I I've went from getting to where I kinda I don't know if dreading it 'cause I love my job, but was a little cautious, you know, you're always looking like I feel a tick, I feel a tick. Always, all day long. You'd see that. To now So you got so you got chewed on and ⁓ you got taken to the hospital. What What exactly happened? I mean, 'cause that's I mean, So I come back from this trip from Alabama and I a lot of you may not know I'm a kidney transplant patient. My first transplant was thirty-three years ago. God's been so good to me. And then after about twenty five years, the the meds I take meds every day. So every transplant patient on the planet, except six I did six, I did this for six, six identical twins that one of them had kidney failure for whatever reason. And the twin gave them a kidney, they don't have to take any medicine because their body accepts that. So my sister, 33 years ago or so, gave me my first kidney. And then seven years ago at that time, my 19-year-old daughter, I my that kidney had failed, and I'm not a good candidate for dialysis and I was gonna die. And my 19-year-old daughter saved my life and gave me a kidney. And I wanna just take a little aside here a second. I know I do this a lot, but I want to tell y'all what living a life of faith is like. So we're at the Mayo Clinic. We are in the pre-op, which most people are nervous, and you even hear some whining. You know, there's a lot of fam, a lot of people in pre op at the mayo clinic. It's a scary place, folks. We're prayed up. Today is good. Heaven is unimaginably better. We I I believe we can't imagine it. And and we're why I you know, my wife's up there, and I didn't want my wife running from my daughter's room to my room. That one happened anyway. She stayed my daughter. You Grants passing on, that's okay. I'm saying my daughter. So we took some two older couples, older than us that have been mentors in life to us. Great cu everyone needs a mentor. Great couples, Mr. Hambee Mr. Manning, and their wives to the mail clinic. So spread the love around. And we're all in pre op and they've already scrubbed and, you know, we're ready and they take the donor out first. And they actually open them up and fit they've done all these tests but physically inspect the kidney before they put the recipient under and open them up. So you're gonna make Raleigh. Raleigh's a swimmer, right? She swam all through school. The swimmers are strong. Strong people, swimmers are. You want someone dragging a deer out of the woods, get a swimmer. And they're taking her out and she's by the door to leave and we've you know said goodbye and prayed one last time and left. Those swimming arms come out and stop her stops the derny. She goes through a door, she stops that derny. I mean she stop there's two big nurses push she's she stops that thing as tracks men. And I'm thinking my daughter this my oldest daughter oldest children, the one you want dragging out of the house if the house is burning down. I mean they're calm, cool and collected. My daughter's super calm. And she stops at during his tracks, run jumps off of it after being stared, not supposed to touch the floor, gets her little dressing room. And I'm thinking, Raleigh's never panicked a minute in her life. I I can't believe she's you know, what's wrong? And I go running to her, she comes out of the dressing room with a bag of kidney beans and said, Dad, I forgot to give you this. Pick the one you want. And the nurses And everyone in that room are looking at us like, Who are these crazy insane hillbillies up here? Right. And we're all thinking, Y'all need to know Jesus, because when you know Jesus, you can have fun in life. You don't have to paint back in anything. Even a kidney transplant. And this they you know, we laughed and hugged and they scrubbed her back down and we go through the transplant. And at that night At nine A.M. we had to transplant about one in the afternoon. At nine a.m. I hear some rattling come to room. Mr. Hamby, Mr. Banning, they're both deer hunters, of course. We're in her talking deer. I mean I got tubes all over me and places you don't want to talk about and not feeling all that great. But we're talking about deer and where we gonna hunt that fall. And I hear rattling, things just nurse coming in and take my vitals in, and it's my daughter. Eight hours after she got opened up and gave me kitties, she walks in my room carrying her own IV Poe and blood pressure monitor to check on me. That is a life you live when you have no fear. And you have no fear because you love Jesus. Yeah. That is great. So I go to Alabama and I come home and not feeling too good the next day, but working even on transplant patient, normal guy. Don't want to go doctor. And two days later, my wife says, Man, you look kind of you look like a wet rag, Grant. And I think something's wrong with you. I got a little fever, no big deal. Says you need to go doctor. I'm not going to. By day three, I can barely get out of bed. I mean, I'm bad shape. I'm taking a doctor. So we get in the minivan, drive up to the internist I see, and and I I do not have any memory of this. Apparently I'm kind of just sitting there like a dog getting ready to go down. Doctor comes in, says, Grant, do you want to go to hospital? He doesn't take any tests or anything, he just looks at me. And I have no recollection. Apparently I said, uh-huh. And he said, Tracy, if Grant wants to go to hospital, he's deadly sick. So I'm still mad about this. They called the ambulance. I'm eight hours away. She drove me an hour to the doctor. We live out in the boonies. I'm I'm I'm eight minutes, eight miles from the hospital. Why pay for an ambulance? Don't mean to back the minivan, drive to the immersion room. That was an expense I didn't want to get. But they call an ambulance. It takes me to there where God really God intervened a lot, but where God really intervened. I got a young doctor that did not have an attitude. Those are hard to find, those being honest. And he looks at my chart. So this guy's a double transplant patient. We got no idea what's going on. None of our normal tests or anything. He's going to die. Call your family tell him goodbye, which they did. And I'm gonna call the Mayo Clinic. I see he's a decade long transplant patient. He's a guinea pig. Most of them don't live that long. And see if they're interested. And they were and they lifelied. They sent an air ambulance down here to get me. They sent a plane down to get me. And the mayo I almost Selfishly hate saying this because people don't understand what the mail is. There's nothing comparable to it on the planet. No, not one. Not John Hopkins on anywhere else. I hate saying that because it's getting busy. And once they get there, they take over. They come into the hospital, they displace those doctors, they take over instantly. They take over the ambulance. They make sure I get to the plane because I'm about to die. They get on the plane. I have no memory of this whatsoever. ⁓ my wife jumps on the plane with me, the family says bye, never see you again. I get on the plane, they take me, they got an ambulance waiting at the airport, Rochester, Minnesota, they take me to the hospital. The first time I know what's going on, I'm laying prostrate on a gurney. This is God's sense of humor, I believe. And the out of this whole event, the first word I see is spongiform on a medical cabinet. Does that ring a bell with anyone? That's the family of diseases that CWD's in. And my first con and they know my wife's on my dear biologist are all thinking he's the first human that's got CWD. He's going down. Yep. And we want to get a bunch of samples off this guy. Yeah, yeah. We're gonna be famous. The first word I see laying prostrate with ten or twelve people around me all murmuring and talking and jabbing me and doing stuff is spongiform. And I'm thinking, I'm the first human to ever get C W D. Lucky you. I got A few months to live. And that's what I literally thought. And I instantly start praying. And ⁓ it turned out it was a ricleosis, a tick-borne illness that can kill you. And I hard headed let it go a day or two too long. And it was a ten dollar bottle, literally, of a very old antibiotic called doxycycline. Those of us in the field a lot, I can tell you some really famous people, deer hunting people on TV that you all know. I won't mention her name. That all have a doctor friend and they all carry a bottle of doxycycline in their truck, cause we all are out in the ticks a bunch. And if you start getting a fever, it's doxy safe. I'm not a doctor, you know, you need your own advice, but that ten dollar bottle of doxycycline broke the broke the spell and saved my life. Wow. Wow. But I had no memory for for two days, that's totally gone out of my life. I have no memory of it. Only pictures my wife showed me. And post fun of me about. I mean, it just shows you I mean, I I think your what you said earlier is is really true. Guys, we need to respect what's happening with the ticks. We need we need to think hard. And and this is this is taking place and and it very well can be life and death. Yep. Not to overly raise the alarm, but if we're just smart, yep, cautious, pay attention to what's happening around you, especially if you have any signs, you know, we we can get through it. But It's a new world for us in Michigan. Yeah. I it really is. I I grew up here. I I think that was the first tick last week was the first tick I've ever seen that I would tell you I saw in Michigan. And ⁓ and I'm outside a lot. So it it it it is a different thing coming and ⁓ you know, we appreciate your your thought process and and really starting to help us think through it a little bit. Yeah. ⁓ that's pretty important and and that's a good day for us. So thank you very much. ⁓ I I end with this part. I I encourage every person outside, whatever you're doing, ⁓ especially hunters and fishermen, they're my brothers and sisters, but take precautions. You're in you're either under current technology, you're either spraying a lot and frequently, right? Or you're purchasing clothing that's been professionally treated. And it and I like that 'cause it's treated and it's hardened on there. It's not getting off on you then. You're not these are safe. But It's just d I have no worries. I wear the socks, I wear the pants, I wear the shirt. And I'm back to enjoying it. I can enjoy it. Yeah, I think that's great. So I got one question for you, Grant. You mentioned earlier about the medication that we that it's illegal to medicate the deer in the areas for these things. Do you know why exactly like you can't put that out in like the feed or something like that? Or how I don't exactly share what the process would be. Yeah. But yeah, so if you're yeah, it's a great question. So if you're dos know if you bake corn or something You're gonna see squirrels and cardinals and other birds, whatever, turkeys or whatever on there. So if you're putting a dosage out for a deer, hundred pound deer, and you got a two-ounce cardinal eating it. Mm-hmm. That makes sense. Okay. Or these medications under current format and there's new forms coming, but the old stuff that cat like if you treat cattle with ivermectin, you're supposed to not treat them a minimum of forty-five days before human consumption. Okay. So you treat a deer, this is unlikely, but you treat a deer midsummer, you're planning on withdrawing it, and there's it gets killed on a road and some really hungry person sees roadkill and cars a tinnoid off there and eats it the day after just ingested a bunch of that. That's interesting. And then also, and this is such an unpleasant subject, maybe as or more than ticks, but CWD is real. We're not going very deep in here, but 60 miles from where I'm sitting in Arkansas. There's right now one to five deer per square mile. One to five. You don't hunt where there's one to five deer per square mile. You don't say, Daddy, let's go kill that last doe on our land. Right. That's CWD folks. And it's and it's coming. Make make no mistake about it. You're I I I'm a wildlife biologist, certified wildlife biologist. I I've been doing this for more than forty years. I've been incorporated 36 years. CWD is real. We're not going any further than that because it's a very contentious subject. And I hate it because there's loudmouths out there spewing crap to make money instead of telling the truth. CWD's real. And when you put bait out, they're urinating, salivating, defecating in a really small area so it spreads deer to deer much quicker. Unlike a food plot and and all these stupid arguments, well, food plot's no different to bait, Paul. I've never seen a food plot three-foot circle. I've never seen one plant a three-foot circle like a feeder. I've never seen that. So CWD's real. It's unfortunate. It's unpleasant. And I'm I'm a glass half-ful person. I live my life that way. And I do think there will be a cure someday, but it's not on the horizon right now. So we need to keep CWD at bay as long as we can. That's the best management we have right now, which is just good deer management. Keep deer populations where they need to be, harvest enough does. Doughs control the population, not bucks. They're reproductive units. Harvest enough does. Don't put stuff out that makes deer urinate, salivate, defcate in an unnatural close proximity. And that's the best we can do right now. Which is just good deer management. Just do good deer management. Mm-hmm. I'd agree with that. Cool. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Grant. I mean, I learned a lot on this podcast. Yeah, it's really interesting. Yeah, it's I love hearing all those perspectives on ticks and Hopefully, ⁓ I think I'm gonna be shopping for new clothes. Yeah, exactly. For a topic I never wanted to have to be thinking about. But it helps it helps, you know, there's so many fears around the unknowns, right? It helps just understand what you're working with. And there are ways you can still, even in Missouri, go out and enjoy the outdoors still. So that's great. Yeah. Yeah. Even here. Even here. Rob there are codes online. If you're like me, you're kind of a t I'm I'm a tightwad. There are codes you can get twenty percent off or something like that. You can find it. I'm a tightwad and I you know, we have ⁓ Seven of us wearing it and seven times three is twenty-one sets of clothing. So I want to save money where I can. So yep. You I appreciate that. ⁓ perfect. Well thanks for joining us, Grant. Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity, guys. Yep.