00:00:05 Speaker 1: Welcome to this country Life. I'm your host, Brent Reeves. From coon hunting to trot lining and just general country living. I want you to stay a while as I share my experiences and life lessons. This country life is presented by Case Knives on Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcast. 00:00:25 Speaker 2: The airwaves have to offer. 00:00:27 Speaker 1: All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I've got some stories to share. Ticks, ticks. I can't think of a creepier topic to talk about other than rats and dangs. You ain't talking about them, and I don't know which I hate worse, But this time of year where I live, they are an issue we deal with daily. I'm going to tell you about some stuff I learned while prepping for this podcast. But first I'm gonna tell you something I learned the hard way with this story. That Turkey season wasn't especially warm, cool, or anything really that stood out one way or the other weatherwise. It was just another spring turkey season, and I was doing my dead level best to keep the wild turkey population of Missouri in Arkansas in check. I was doing some filming with a friend of mine, the friend I talked about in episode three twenty one entitled West One Bob Zero. Bob was the guy who I was filming with and who was my initial mentor old filming hunts. Now he shuns the spotlight now And as I explained in that episode, I referred to him as Bob, which isn't his name, and I offer that info only because I don't want you wondering why I didn't include his last name. Bob doesn't have a last name. He's a man of intrigue and mystery, much like the sudden onset of terribleness I felt after returning to Arkansas from a trip with him in Missouri. That trip was etched in my mind not because we'd had bad luck. We'd killed the turkey and gotten some decent footage. It was an absolute great hunt that has never seen the light of day. We could never broker a deal with anyone to sponsor the airtime during the pioneer days of outdoor television, A bunch of that video just sitting in the cans. And that's not the reason that trip was so memorable. It was more haunting than anything else, and it was because of the ticks say what you want and chunk rocks at me when you see me coming, if you feel the need. But you have never never seen ticks any worse than we did that spring a decade or so ago. Now I'm not saying you haven't seen them bad in your corner of the world. I said, you ain't never seen them worse. And I'll go to my grave saying the same thing. Fortunately, you could only hunt half a day in Missouri back then. Now I say fortunately because it took the last half of the day to get all the ticks rounded up and all my person that had laid the claim to their own little piece of reeves land, a neighborhood of which they were not welcomed. It was every day, all day up and until the point of my tenure in this realm. 00:03:30 Speaker 2: I had never seen them that bad. I've only seen them as bad as that once. 00:03:36 Speaker 1: That would be a few years later in the Ozarks, were my friend Michael Meeks and I used to camp and chase turkeys annually during the open week. But that would be a few years later. But back in Missouri, the turkeys were gobbling and the ticks were crawled and biting. No idea how many I pulled off me during that trip, But I bet the farm during those three days it was well over one hundred. 00:04:02 Speaker 2: I actually counted the first day. 00:04:04 Speaker 1: Then I lost track during the next morning when I heard one tick say to a host of others, y'all want to eat him here, I'm just taking him back to our place and finish him there. 00:04:14 Speaker 2: The ticks were bad, real bad. 00:04:21 Speaker 1: Now. The last statement was confirmed when we sat on the back patio after a day of chasing turkeys and killing ticks. We were frying fish, playing music, and visiting with neighbors and relatives. We'd invite it over for supper. It had become an annual event of sorts, with the crowd growing bigger each year. I was paying particular attention to the brim I had swimming in that hot peanut oil when something just happened to catch my eye, and I looked at the back wall of my friend's white house. What are all those dots? Why are all those dots moving? 00:04:55 Speaker 2: Oh? 00:04:55 Speaker 1: Lord, say it ain't so, Joe, say it ain't so. Upon closer inspectually, my fear was confirmed. There were ticks crawling on the outside of the house. Sweet Jesus, that was creepy. I just got a chill, thinking about it. Apossum ran over my grave. They were everywhere. Every itch, every tickle of a breeze, every sensation felt like a tick crawling on me. If you only listen to a few of these episodes, you have no doubt figured out that I grew up in the country. The name of this show is a perfect descriptor of my literal being and my place in humanity. I am a country boy. I've been dealing with ticks. My whole life is just another part of nature. However, that spring in Missouri still gives me the hebe jebbies. There won another possum over my grave. A few days after I got home from that trip, I started feeling bad, like really bad, like I had the flu bad, or what I would assume the flu would feel like. 00:06:00 Speaker 2: I ain't ever had the flu. I've seen other folks. 00:06:02 Speaker 1: Waller around in the throes of despair having had it, but me, I'm seldom, if ever sick. To this day, being sick wouldn't even make a blip on my earthly timeline at that time, outside of having a hernia when I was three, an appendicitis when I was sixteen, jobbing my thumb in a copperheads Mouth when I was nineteen. 00:06:25 Speaker 2: My visits to. 00:06:25 Speaker 1: The hospital had been for reasons other than my lack of health. I hadn't been burdened by or susceptible to the maladies that plague are planted as the rest of you mere mortals have been. 00:06:37 Speaker 2: At least that's what I thought. 00:06:40 Speaker 1: I was about to find out that the rumors of my immortality were based on lies, a literal pyramid of inaccurate assumptions about my tear one abilities to fight off infection and dodge the bullets of sickness. I went to the doctor and he said, looks like you got the flu. I told him I never had the flu of my life, but my symptoms were just like my brother Tims, who'd gotten Rocky Mountain spotted fever the year before. My doctor looked at me with the here we go again look off. Thank goodness you called your brother and let him diagnose you over the phone. I forgot that the state police sent all their folks to the medical school. 00:07:18 Speaker 2: Well. 00:07:18 Speaker 1: That doctor was a good friend of mine, a former combat pilot in Vietnam. He was rough as a cob and didn't mince words when he spoke. The one thing he did, though, was listening to his patience, and I reminded him that he was working for me and I wanted to be tested for tick fever. He humored me, had the nurse draw blood, and ran me out of his office, saying that he'd called me when he got the results. A week later, he called and he said he was sending all my charts to my brother. I had Rocky Mountain spotted fever. He nailed my diagnosis. After a steady diet of doxy cycline. I was good as new almost. Doctor told me that I could possibly always test positive for it, and then there may be flare ups of muscle and joint aches for the rest of my life because of it. He also said I should always inform anyone when and if I ever donated blood. Well, I haven't noticed enough flare ups over the last twenty years to even remember a specific time, and I've donated enough blood during that time to float that sea arc boat out there in my yard. But I'm ever vigilant these days, and I have been since, and I've had dreams over the last twenty years of sea and those ticks crawling on the side of the house. 00:08:37 Speaker 2: It's funny. 00:08:38 Speaker 1: I have been within arm's reach of enough bears to fill up a Greyhound bus and never gotten so much as a scratch and a tick. A lowly tick tried to kill me. That's just how that happened. The CDC reports around six thousand cases of Rocky Mountain spotted fever each year, But despite its name, you're more likely to get it in North Carolina, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and wait for it, wait for it, Missouri. The chances of you getting sick remain small percentage wise. If you get bit by a tick, only certain varieties carried disease and you have to be susceptible to catching it. Normally, the infected tick has to be attached for a prolonged period of time before the transference occurs. If you figure out all the folks that are outside where takes can be found in those states alone, your chances of getting sick from a tick bite are extremely remote. Fortunately, Rocky Mountain spotted fever is highly treatable with antibiotics. Unfortunately, Rocky Mountain spotted fever is the least of the issues when it comes to tick born diseases. There are twenty t different pathogens that can make humans sick, including erlichiosis, lyme disease, to laarhemia, and tick paralysis. In two thousand and nine, if of gall syndrome joined the chat and if all that other wasn't enough, that condition is that forced to be reckoned with And doing just a modicum bit of researcher for this podcast, I discovered illnesses I'd never heard of. But I'm amazed I never contracted, just by the sheer number of ticks that I've hosted over my lifetime. In the opening story, I told you about getting Rocky Mountain spotted feverbody. I didn't tell you the circumstances. It was a tick on the backside of my ribcage that I found by accident a day after I got home from that trip. Had I noticed it when it bit me, I doubt I'd ever had gotten it. That's why checking yourself and especially the little folks that hang around with you, is so important in prevention. Back during the conflagration known as COVID, my daughter Bailey and I did a project of making a coon feeder to concentrate the bandid. It was to a certain area to help train our coon down Whalen we failed it, and I shared that video from five years ago, not long ago, on my social media. Now, what I didn't show on that video is when Bailey and I were walking back to the truck because she was telling me about all the little spiders that she'd seen, and she told me that she'd wiped a. 00:11:25 Speaker 2: Bunch of them off her breeches. They caught my attention. I stood her up on the tailgate. 00:11:30 Speaker 1: It was then I saw she'd gotten into a miss of seed ticks and big ticks. Luckily she'd noticed them and said something. I was able to get her squared away before we ever left. On that same trip, I didn't get one, not one, and she'd been covered up with them. I'm friends with a few folks that have been sucker punched by tick diseases. And when I think about the multitude of people I know that do the same kind of things that I do, you'd think there'd be more. One such person is my friend Ronney Cowan. Ronnie's a wildlife biologist and the state Outdoor Recreation Specialist for the University of Tennessee. Ronnie's a lifelong hunter, and he and I met on a coon hunt last winter on the White River with my regular coon hunting palas at the Cash River Coon Club. Ronnie's a strong advocate for outdoor recreation, and a tick bite forced him to completely rethink how he hunts, trains dogs, and connect others to conservation now. He shared the following during a recent conversation he and I had. Here's what Ronnie said. A few years ago, I was diagnosed with alpha gal syndrome and it flipped my outdoor world upside down. Red meat was off the table literally, But instead of walking away from hunting, I leaned deeper into it and became a bird hunter. Now, thanks to some advice from Tony Peterson, who was incredibly helpful and getting me started in dog work, I retooled my life, got a bird dog, and found a new path into ethical hunting and mendorship. Now that change not only saved my outdoor identity, gave me a new purpose. Nice job, Ronnie, and quite a shout out to our own Tony Peterson for his help. That is the absolute textbook definition of taking a negative and turned it into a positive. If you haven't heard of alpha gal syndrome, here's a simple descriptor. Alpha gal is a carbohydrate molecule contained within red meat. The pathogen that you get from the tick reacts adversely with that molecule in red meat, and it makes you sick. 00:13:45 Speaker 2: There is no cure. 00:13:47 Speaker 1: Adding insult to injury is the fact that you ain't even got to eat red meat to get sick. If you have alpha gal, all you gotta do is touch some and it can trigger the illness if you get it. I hope you like chicken and fish, because that's the menu you're going to be ordering from. Feathers and scales, period. I couldn't fathom not being able to eat red meat again. I feel for those folks, but I also ain't gonna stay inside to ensure I never get it. If the ticks keep us from doing what we want, they win. We can't let the ticks win. We can't now if ticks are making us sick wasn't bad enough, they'll also do a number on our dogs. Just about everything that we can get from a tick, our dogs can get too. Depending on where you live, you're looking at a specific type of threats. I was today years old when I learned dogs can get lyme disease. I was chatting at that with my friend in Whalen's personal physician, doctor Jonathan Bradshaw, DVM to the Stars, and I was talking to him about tick stuff, and he told me that certain areas of the country where more prone to produce certain types of tick diseases that can be a big problem to your four legged piles ain't properly protected from specific diseases in specific areas, especially if you travel with you dogs like he does in hunt tests and field trial competitions with his retrievers, or like I do with friends around the country chasing coons. For example, down here in the South, er likia is the biggest threat to dogs, but there's a hot spot of lime disease around Dallas, just like up in New England. 00:15:25 Speaker 2: Who knew that? 00:15:27 Speaker 1: And across the big muddy over in Mississippi, my buddy Lake Pickle is dealing with keeping his yellow lab Knocks from getting annaplasmosis, which seems to be a bigger issue there than here. Traveling around puts you in new territory and associates your dogs with other dogs from other places who may have an altogether different set of tick threats from where they're from. This is most certainly true in the competition world. Where dogs from all over congregate in one setting, adding to the risk and raising the percentage of potential tick pathog and infections even higher. Is the fact that while we all like to think that everyone takes as good as care as we do of our pets and their general health, it's just not always the case. It's easy for a tick to hit your ride in the dog box and wind up someplace they never dreamed of the next morning, just full full of dogs everywhere. 00:16:24 Speaker 2: It'd be like me. 00:16:25 Speaker 1: Going to sleep one night and waking up the next morning in a watermelon patch. So to take care of your hunting buddies, it's just like driving a car down the highway. You have to drive and pay attention to the cars around you as if they don't know anything about driving. Same thing applies to your dog. Think defensively. I was fortunate enough to be invited to the Flint Oak Branch in Fall River Canvas back in January of twenty twenty four. I was speaking out of hunters with Mission Bank, which just down the road and Independence. The next night, I went a day early to with my friends tough In to coat a gram at Flannel Branch. Toughy told me when I got there that they wouldn't allow Whaling to stay in the kennels with their bird dogs for their protection. 00:17:10 Speaker 2: Now I wasn't offended in the least. I got it. I understood why those folks don't know me. 00:17:16 Speaker 1: They were looking out for the best interest of their five star shooting facility. Tuffy said, you can keep Whaling in your room if you want. Now, that's suited me just fine Whaling too. Truth being on, I was planning on slipping him in there anyway, because I didn't know how their kettles were kept. It turns out the kennels were just as meticulously cared for and clean as the sweet we stayed in, except Whaling drank his water out of a fancy leather bound ice bucket in our room while the dogs out and the kennels only had polished stainless steep. Now Whaling would have been just fine out there. Heck I'd have been fine out there. But you just never know, and you can't take a chance. It's also the possibility of skullduggery. Now, for all of you that have hung on this long and are now trying to figure out what in the world is Brent talking about? Skullduggery. Skullduggery means underhanded and unscrupulous behavior. So what's that got to do with ticks? I'm so glad you asked, y'all. 00:18:20 Speaker 2: Remember mister Leon. 00:18:21 Speaker 1: He was the old World War two bet that I worked with in the woods back in the nineteen eighties. Well, he told me about a guy on his crew that he worked with before I came there. That told it an empty pill bottle in his shirt pocket, and every day, when the ticks were out, he'd catch them crawling and drop them in that pill bottle. Now that ain't weird enough. He then took them to a local country store he traded with and stopped at every afternoon after work, and would dump them out in that store when the propriety. 00:18:52 Speaker 2: Wasn't looking because he hated him. 00:18:55 Speaker 1: Now, apparently they'd had some kind of business deal many years before, and the store owner took advantage of him and beat him out of some money. So even the score, this dude was unleashing a daily carpet bombing of ticks in his store to prey upon the masses. Now, mister Leon said, I don't know how long he'd been doing that when I caught him, but when I did, I made him stop. However, it was a multi year campaign. According to him, TICS, I hate him and the only thing that disappoints me when I catch one and smash the life out of him is I can't hear him screaming when I do it. Talk to your vet where you live and get the protection for your dogs specific to the places you're going to have them operating in, and most importantly, check them for texts when the hunt's over. The same goes for you and your youngins. Lots of options out there, but there's nothing better than a self inspection once you get back to the CASA. Now be symptom of weare of clues that may on set, especially after thirty six hours of getting bitter exposed. It's always better to air on the side of caution. Formetha and spray will have the moon walking on your breeches until they fall off dead as disco, but with any chemical applications there's always safety protocols to follow. That's gonna about do it for this satellite view on TICS. I'm thinking about doing a deeper dive later on if y'all are interested, and maybe having some folks on to tell how they've dealt with issues as a result of tick boxes. Y'all let us know if you're interested. Thank y'all so much for listening to us here on the bear Grease channel. If we've got the bear Grease, the render this country life and now Backwoods University right here, my old buddy Lake pickle until next week. 00:20:49 Speaker 2: This is Brent Reeves signing off. Y'all be careful 00:21:02 Speaker 1: Entering