Bear Grease - Ep. 335: This Country Life - Ticks

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

It’s creepy crawly season in most places and that means, among other things, that ticks are on the prowl. Aside from staying indoors, there’s really no avoiding these obnoxious little parasites. Brent’s talking about a time 20 years ago when they were at nightmarish levels and so bad, in fact, that he got sick from a bite! With the potential threat of the many diseases and illnesses that ticks bring, Brent's giving an overview of how to deal with these stinkers to help both you and your dogs. Grab a partner because it's time to check for ticks on MeatEater's "This Country Life" podcast. Subscribe to the MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Connect with Brent and MeatEater MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Shop This Country Life Merch Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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 Eat Eater's Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcasts that Airways have to offer. 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 a dang sure 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 going to tell you something I learned the hard way with this story. That turkey season wasn't especially warm, cool, cool, or anything, really, that stood out one way or the other weather-wise.

It was just another spring turkey season, and I was doing my dead level best to keep the wild turkey population of Missouri and Arkansas in check. I was doing some filming with a friend of mine, the friend I talked about in episode 321 entitled West 1 Bob Zero. Bob was the guy who I was filming with

and who was my initial mentor over 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 a 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 can. 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 a 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 same thing. Fortunately, you could only hunt half a day in Missouri back then. I say fortunately, because it took the last half of the day to get all the ticks rounded up and off my person that had laid claim to their own little piece of Reevesland, a neighborhood of which they were not welcome.

It was every day all day. Up and until the point of my tenure in this realm, I had never seen them that bad. I've only seen them as bad as that once, that would be a few years later. In the Ozarks where my friend Michael Meeks and I used to camp and chase turkeys annually during an open week, but that would be a few years.

later. But back in Missouri, the turkeys were gobbling and the ticks were crawling and biting. No idea how many I pulled off me during that trip, but I'd bet the farm during those three days it was well over a hundred. I actually counted the first day, 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 back to our place and finish him there. The ticks were bad. real bad. 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 invited 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? Oh, Lord, say it ain't so, Joe. Say it ain't so. Upon closer inspection, 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.

A possum 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 as just another part of nature. However, that spring in Missouri still gives me the hebi-jibis. Hmm,

there went another possum over my grave. A few days after I got home from that trip, I started to feeling bad like really bad, like I had the flu bad, or what I would assume the flu would feel like. I ain't ever had the flu. I've seen other folks 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 16 or jobbing my thumb in a copperhead's mouth when I was 19, my visits to 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 our planet as the rest of you mere mortals have been. At least that's

what I thought. I was about to find out that the rumors of my immortality were based on lies, a literal pyramid of inaccurate assumptions about my terranobilities 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 in my life, but my symptoms were just like my brother Tim's who'd gotten Rocky Mountain spotted fever the year before. My doctor looked at me with the, here we go again, look of thank goodness you called your brother

and let him diagnose you over the phone. I'd forgot that the state police sent all their folks to the medical school. Well, 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 listen to his patients, 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 call 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'd nailed my diagnosis. After a steady diet of doxycycline, I was good as new, almost. Doctor told me that I could possibly always test positive for it, and 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 20 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 20 years of seeing those ticks crawling on the side of the house. It's funny. 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. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds. that gobblers are looking for.

I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps' cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com.

I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Rinella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. The CDC reports around 6,000 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 way.

if you get bit by a tick. Only certain varieties carry a 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 ticks 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-borne diseases. There are 20 different pathogens that can make human sick, including ehrlichiosis, Lyme disease, tularemia, and tick paralysis. In 2009, Alpha-Gal syndrome joined the chat, and if all that other wasn't enough, that condition is a force 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 fever, but I didn't tell you the circumstances. It was a tick on the backside of my rib cage 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. But that's why checking yourself, and especially the little folks that hang around with you, it's 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 banditoos to a certain area to help train our Coon, Wailin.

We filmed 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, she was telling me about all the little spiders that she'd seen. And she told me that she'd wiped a bunch of them off her britches. That caught my attention, I stood her up on the tailgate. It was then I saw she'd gotten into a mess of seed ticks and big ticks.

Luckily, she'd noticed them and said something, and 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 Ronnie 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 pals 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, and here's what Ronnie said. A few years ago, I was diagnosed with Alpha Gal syndrome and it flipped my outdoor work.

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 in getting me started in dog work, I retooled my life, got a bird dog, and found a new path into ethical hunting and mentorship. Now, that changed 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 makes you sick. There is no cure. Add an insult to injury is the fact that you ain't even got to eat red meat to get sick. If you have a half a gal, all you got to 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 going to 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 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 it up with my friend and Waylon's personal physician.

Dr. 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 were more prone to produce certain types of tick diseases. That can be a big problem if your four-legged pals ain't properly protected from specific diseases in specific areas, especially if you travel with your dogs like he does in hunt tests and field trial competitions with his retrievers

or like I do with friends around the country chasing, For example, down here in the south, Erlikia is the biggest threat to dogs, but there's a hot spot of Lyme disease around Dallas, just like up in New England. Who knew that? And, and across the big muddy over in Mississippi, my buddy Lake Pickle is dealing with keeping his yellow lab knocks from getting anaplasmosis, which seems to be a bigger issue there than here. Traveling around puts you a 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 pathogen infections even higher is the fact that while we all like to think that everyone takes as good at care as we do of our pets and their general health, that'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'd never dreamed of the next morning just full of dogs everywhere. It'd be like me 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. drive it. Same thing applies to your dog. Think defensively. I was fortunate enough to be invited to the Flint Oak Ranch in Fall River Kansas back in January of 2024. I was speaking at a hunters with mission banquet just down the road in independence the next night.

I went a day early to hunt with my friends Tuffy and Dakota Graham at Flint Oak Ranch. Tuffy told me when I got there that they wouldn't allow Whalen to stay in the kennels with their bird dogs for their protection. I wasn't offended in the least. I got it. I understood why. Those folks don't know me. 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 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 kennels were kept. Turns out the kennels were just as meticulously cared for and clean as the sweet we stayed in, Except Whalen drank his water out of a fancy leather-bound ice bucket in our room while the dogs out in the kennels only had polished stainless steel. Whalen 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. There's also the possibility of skull duggery. 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. Skull duggery means underhanded and unscrupulous behavior. So what's that got to do with ticks?

I'm so glad you asked. Do you remember Mr. Leon? He was the old World War II vet that I worked with in the woods back in the 1980s. Well, he told me about a guy on his crew that he worked with before I came there that toted 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 him 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 wasn't looking because he hated him. Apparently, they'd had some kind of business deal many years before, and the store owner took advantage of him and feed him out of some money. So, to even the score, this dude was unleashing,

him a daily carpet bombing of ticks in his store to prey upon the masses. Now, Mr. 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. Ticks. 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 ticks when the hunt's over the same goes for you and your youngans lots of options out there but there's nothing better than a self-inspection once you get back to the casa now be symptom aware of clues that may onset especially after 36 hours of getting bitter exposed it's always better to air on the side of caution. Promethrin spray will have them moon walking on your bridges until they fall off dead as disco, but with any chemical applications, there's always safety protocols to follow.

That's going to about do it for this satellite view on ticks. 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 bikes. Y'all let us know if you're interested. Thank you all so much for listening to us here on the Bear Grease channel. We've got the Bear Grease, the Render, this country live, and now Backwoods University, right here. My old buddy Lake Pickle. Until next week, this is Brent Reeves, signing off.

Y'all be careful. On blood trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bed, and there was a full of blood. Oh, my God. he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors,

where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper, from cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness.

because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.