I recently had some friends discuss deer in SW Florida. I am working on book 13 on these infections, and I was clueless.
“Are you seeing the deer deep hiking, hunting or fishing?” I asked.
They looked at me like I had a brain disease.
“No. Not at all,” said one smart lady. “Two were three feet away from me, walking my dog, and by a home’s hedge.” Meaning, it was not a National Park. It was her neighborhood!
Another added, “You used to see them 100 ft away. Now they are in our yards. They are everywhere.”
A week earlier, a Naples friend reported two of his dogs were infested.
“Infested?” I asked. “With what?”
“Ticks,” he said. And added, “It was a bloody mess.”
That means many ticks had bitten and glued themselves into the dog’s skin, and his fixing this was wilder than the delicate diamond-cutter, gentle, tiny tweezors guidelines informed physicians suggest. Ticks are living infection labs and are not white, bleachy, or sterile, carrying just one lonely single germ: “Lyme.”
You do not attack vast numbers like a tiger shark, or you will push the tick’s intestinal sewer, and even infectious saliva, deep into a mammal’s body.
I just keep hearing my local SW Florida neighbors’ words, over and over in my mind, something I escaped from in my lovely scenic mountain horse country home far outside Philly….
“THE DEER ARE ALL OVER-EVERYWHERE.”