S4 E39 - Lone Star Tick vs Deer Hunters - The Truth About Alfa-gal

The Lone Star Tick Myth and America’s Deer Crisis

A 47-year-old New Jersey man ate a hamburger at a backyard barbecue and died a few hours later.
 The media blamed the Lone Star Tick.
 Then they blamed climate change.
 Both claims collapse under the slightest scrutiny.

In this episode of The Tenth Man, we break down the truth behind Alpha-gal syndrome — the delayed meat allergy caused when ticks transfer a mammalian sugar molecule into the human bloodstream. It’s not venom, it’s not a toxin, and it’s not a climate artifact. Any tick can spread it, and the real vector isn’t the tick at all — it’s the deer.

We look at America’s 100-fold deer population explosion, why ticks simply follow deer into suburbs, and how “majestic” deer have become attractive vermin spreading disease. We dive into invasive species introduced by well-meaning animal lovers, the media’s lazy climate-change scapegoating, and the political regulations that choke hunters while protecting the very practices that spread disease.

From baiting bans to crop-damage permits to the absurd Sandhill Crane law that makes it illegal to eat a bird you were ordered to kill — this episode exposes how wildlife policy has been hijacked by feelings over science.

Hunters enter the woods this week to protect public health.
 The government? Not so much.

#TheTenthMan #AlphaGal #MediaMisinformation #ClimateChangeMyth 

#DeerSeason #MichiganHunting #WildlifeManagement #HuntingRights 

#InvasiveSpecies #TickBorneDisease #PublicHealth #PoliticalCommentary 

#ConservationFails #lonestartick
 

Commentary on trending issues brought to you with a moderate perspective.

Transcript

Deer Tick II

[00:00:00] Deer season opens and hunters head out to put meat in the freezer while stopping a public health threat. It's deer that are killing us, not climate change. Today on the 10th, man,

[00:00:33] A man died from a hamburger, because a tick bit him after feeding on a deer.

[00:00:38] Doctors are confirming a first of its kind death from a tick, a man dying because of a meat allergy he suffered after a tick bite. 

[00:00:45] researchers determined he had an allergy called Alpha Gal Syndrome caused by the bite of the lone star tick.

[00:00:53] That was a clip from ABC News. A 47-year-old New Jersey man ate a hamburger at a backyard barbecue and was dead a few hours later. The official cause: fatal anaphylaxis from a tick-borne reaction. He had actually suffered an earlier episode, GI distress, vomiting, diarrhea a few hours after eating a steak on a camping trip a few weeks before.

[00:01:18] The condition is called Alpha Gal Syndrome, but the true headline is simple. 

[00:01:24] A man died because a tick bit him. The tick came from a deer and America is drowning, smothering in deer. But what are the news media telling us? Here's their favorite line. Wait for it. Tick populations in general have been on the rise. One factor, climate change, including milder winters. 

[00:01:45] Right. Climate change, except it's not. Now this delayed allergic reaction, Alpha gal, is not venom, not a toxin, and not a climate artifact. It's simply an allergic reaction to sugar molecule found in most mammals except primates. It's not in us. A tick feeds on a deer, picks it up and later injects it into a human.

[00:02:12] And when the media used their favorite line, that's: the lone star tick spreading because of climate change, here's one thing, they leave out. The Lone Star tick is a problem, but theoretically, any tick as well as other parasites can transmit Alpha Gal. And if that tick fed on a deer, raccoon or cow, it can pass it along to a human.

[00:02:36] But a single evil species and a climate narrative sounds more dramatic, though biology doesn't really care about headlines. But the biggest lie is that the Lone Star tick is supposedly spreading by climate change. There's no proof that it is, and plenty of proof that it is not. Does the Lone Star tick expand its range?

[00:03:04] Yes. But not for the reasons you've been sold or told. Entomologists like Ilia Rochin at Rutgers and Anders Lindstroem in Sweden say that land management and deer are the main factors in the spread of the Lone Star tick.

[00:03:25] Ticks don't migrate. They don't roam the countryside checking Zillow listings. They have tiny legs and no wings, so they ride and their preferred Uber driver is the Whitetail deer. Deer are the transportation system of the tick world, and where deer go, ticks go. And let's just pause for a moment to say, please ask a friend to listen to The Tenth Man.

[00:03:51] The way we grow is by word of mouth, so we appreciate your spreading the word. Now back to our episode.

[00:04:00] And no, this is not a new species invading virgin territory. Lindstroem's work translates the journals of a Finnish naturalist who documented its presence, the Lone Star tick that is across much of the Eastern US, in the 1700s. It disappeared from some regions only because deer populations collapsed. Now the deer numbers have exploded again. Because suburbs create perfect edge habitat, the ticks have simply reoccupied their old range.

[00:04:35] This has nothing to do with climate. It has everything to do with deer. America is one giant deer, buffet, lawns, gardens, orchards, shrubs, golf courses, and your hostas. Hostas are like chocolate cake to deer. If you grow hostas, you're running a deer cafeteria. So while the news claims the known Lonestar Tick is expanding its range, the simple truth is deer expanded their range for them.

[00:05:08] And here's the most unknown ecological fact in America. Before Columbus, the estimated deer population was about 300,000 across the entire continent. Today, over 30 million. That's a hundred fold increase. So the deer population is not fragile. They're not majestic, fragile creatures. Far from it. It was the Indians who kept the deer in check through the centuries by relentless hunting and controlled burns of the forest.

[00:05:47] But now the Deer follow man, the white man that is, wherever he goes. Just like pigeons, cockroaches and rats. Deer, after all, are just long-legged rats. They're attractive vermin. I guess we consider them attractive, but they're vermin, nevertheless. Just like the black death was spread by fleas on rats, other parasites on another mammal.

[00:06:16] Modern tick-borne diseases are spread by ticks on deer. Diseases you've never heard of, perhaps like chronic wasting disease and bovine tuberculosis and diseases you probably have heard of like Lyme disease, and now Alpha Gal. They're all spread by deer, but because Disney draws eyelashes on them, people treat them like magical woodland creatures,

[00:06:43] liberals in the media, especially.

[00:06:47] People who are supposedly animal lovers, are actually the greatest danger to the environment. They've been wrecking ecosystems for over a century. Take the starlings. They're the black iridescent birds you see everywhere. They're great for kids with BB guns because you're allowed to shoot them any time of the year.

[00:07:09] That's what the phrase, no closed season means. And we have 200 million of them all descended from 100 birds released in Central Park in 1890 by a group of literary romantics who wanted America to have every bird mentioned in Shakespeare's works. Not scientists, not biologists or conservationists, just Victorian bird lovers.

[00:07:36] And now these aggressive invaders displace our native cavity nesters like the Eastern Bluebird and many species of woodpecker. The Mute Swan, same story. They were imported by wealthy ladies as decorative lawn ornaments for wealthy estates. They escaped or were deliberately released, and now they outcompete native Trumpeter and Tundra swans.

[00:08:03] These birds tear up submerged vegetation and they run off ducks and geese, but you're not allowed to do anything about them because liberal women think they're pretty and have passed laws actually protecting this invasive species.

[00:08:21] Canada geese, another mess. Wildlife agencies, which should have known better

[00:08:27] collected geese and spread them around the country to supposedly restore populations. Except Canada geese are supposed to migrate and that migratory behavior is learned. You would think they might have known this. But these birds had no elders to teach them the route, so they stayed put. And now we have permanent year round resident goose populations exploding across suburbs, golf courses, office parks, and city lakes, all across the United States, the entire United States and parts of Mexico and Canada.

[00:09:04] So these are invasive birds by any rational ecological definition, even though they're technically native. A new invasive nuisance population created entirely by man and now protected by animal lovers.

[00:09:20] Releasing non-migratory geese is the ecological equivalent of releasing wild buffalo into Central Park. Also technically native, but still a terrible idea.

[00:09:33] Do you know how easily we could eradicate the goose problem? ' In the spring when you see the geese waddling around with their goslings following them, do you know that you could catch 'em all with a net? Once a year while they're caring for their young who are too young to fly, God has wisely provided that that's the right time for the geese, the adult geese to molt to lose their flight feathers and grow new ones,

[00:09:59] and as a result, they can't fly either. So you could just catch all the geese on the golf course by throwing a net over 'em, and you could give those geese to every person on SNAP or food stamps to eat for dinner. And you could eliminate two problems. You'd get rid of the geese and the SNAP problem because the people on food stamps are too lazy to kill, pluck, dress, and cook a goose to eat.

[00:10:27] These people only like to eat Hot Pockets, and this isn't a new idea. People have tried the goose roundup in food giveaway before, but of course all the liberal ladies came out and protested. When the choice becomes harvest the geese versus feed highly processed food to the poor, the Nestle and Frito-Lay companies win out.

[00:10:54] Then you've got Burmese Pythons in the Everglades -pet snakes released by exotic animal enthusiasts. More animal lovers releasing snakes that are responsible for the disappearance of all the small mammals in the Everglades, not to mention a fair amount of deer. There are so many burny Burmese pythons that now they host python roundups.

[00:11:21] You get a prize for catching the most pythons, but get this. Your catch only counts if you kill the pythons humanely and ethically, because that's what the animal lovers want. Of course, if you caught a python, you just naturally whack off its head with a machete, but in the roundup, that's not permitted.

[00:11:43] It's as if the python, humanely smothers, every raccoon that it eats

[00:11:49] And aquatic weeds. Does it bother you that you go by a lake and you see that they're spraying chemicals into the lakes to kill aquatic weeds as if like they're interfering with nature? Well, the weeds are the interference with nature because these too are invasives. Every aquatic plant choking our lakes comes from tropical fish hobbyists who got tired of their toy animals and dumped them out into the wild, setting them free.

[00:12:22] Why are we so permissive of this behavior? You know, the police conducting drills at a school recently, they accidentally left behind an empty spent pistol shell, and the school was shut down. People went nuts when a child found this. An empty brass casing not only is harmless, but cannot be made dangerous by any act of man.

[00:12:49] And yet the school is shut down in a frenzy. Meanwhile, people routinely dump their biological garbage into our environment, creating eternal problems, and we just sit back and take it. Animal lovers did this. Animal lovers did all of this. Oh, and not just in America. Italy to give just one example is, is even now being overrun by American Gray Squirrels released by Sentimentalists, who thought they looked cute. And now the native squirrels are being pushed out.

[00:13:29] And when other people come to try and fix these messes, wildlife managers, farmers, air, airport officials, hunters, they get scolded by people who think nature is just a Disney movie. And now we're seeing the same thing with ticks and deer. Don't cull the herds. Don't let the hunters bait the deer. Protect the majestic animals.

[00:13:56] America doesn't have an invasive species crisis so much as it has a people who think nature is just cute crisis. And the reporters are especially lost. Anytime they get a complicated story, they just pull the, uh, fire alarm and shout, climate change as a universal explanation. But Alpha-gal syndrome follows a simple pattern that has nothing to do with climate.

[00:14:25] The correct headline should have been, "Deer Overpopulation, Drives Tick-borne Meat Allergy, One Dead". So far, and as far as we know. But of course that doesn't get clicks. Nature controls deer in only three ways, predation, habitat limits, and human harvest or hunting. Now, predation, the predators are rare.

[00:14:57] There are few mountain lions or wolves in the northeast. They're not gonna budge the needle. Habitat. Now habitat is plentiful. In fact, the habitat is too good, and that's important because the only real threat to any animal population is habitat loss. Predation can control it. The only thing that wipes it out is habitat loss.

[00:15:24] Like when they talk about arctic ice and the polar bears, they at least have the right idea because ice is habitat. And loss of habitat can threaten a species. But not hunting. It is impossible to eliminate a species through regulated sports hunting because you have to have the animals in order to have the sports hunting. And yet without predation, the only remaining mechanism is hunting.

[00:15:55] But we cripple that with regulations. Take baiting, for example, spreading feed to attract animals into range. An apple tree drops apples and deer will come. Oak trees drop acorns and the deer will come. And hunters take note of this. They pattern deer movements this way, and in some areas you're allowed to apply supplemental feed bait, apples, carrots, or corn, and spread it thinly in the woods.

[00:16:28] But the politicians all want to ban it. That means that if apples fall naturally on the ground, that's fine, but if you should pick them up and move them, you're breaking the law. Hunters are punished so energetically that if you accidentally hunt within 100 feet of where someone else has scattered grain, you'll be ticketed and fined.

[00:16:58] Meanwhile, suburban homeowners dump full buckets of corn into troughs so a dozen deer can shove their germ covered noses into the same slop. That's how you spread diseases like bovine tuberculosis, chronic wasting disease, parasites, and deer ticks. Hunters get fined suburban feeders get Instagram photos.

[00:17:25] Deer herds grow larger in the wrong places and diseases spread. If they really cared about public health, they'd encourage baiting because it helps hunters remove more deer more efficiently. Actually, in my own state, the Wildlife Agency in charge, the DNR wants to allow baiting again, but the Democrat legislature prohibits it.

[00:17:51] Ah, the Democrat experts in the legislature. Now, how does that benefit anyone?

[00:17:59] Well, there's another control. There are crop damage permits. Farmers can legally kill deer destroying crops if they get a permit. But if natural forces controlled deer populations, those permits wouldn't exist. Deer only leave the woods because the herd is so inflated that their natural food source doesn't sustain them.

[00:18:25] Now is that humane? Crop damage permits are silent proof that conservation policies are failing.

[00:18:35] And if that doesn't convince you, look at Sandhill cranes. These birds, which were never seen years ago, are abundant in Michigan. Fine. There's no reason to wipe them out, but they're everywhere. They've lost all fear of humans, a phenomenon called the Ecology of Fear, which describes how animals alter their behavior based on perceived risk. Now Sandhill cranes are delicious. They're called the rib eye of the sky. They're a game bird by any logical definition. But in Michigan, Nebraska, and in parts of other states, they're not classified as a game bird. You can hunt them in some states, but others, they think they're just too pretty and like the deer, they're so overpopulated and doing so much crop damage that farmers can get permits to kill them.

[00:19:29] But by an act of incredible bureaucracy, it's illegal to eat them. You must waste a perfectly edible bird because someone thinks the live ones are beautiful. That's not conservation, that isn't science. That's some kind of perverted emotion, and it's immoral.

[00:19:52] On November 15th, Michigan's firearm, deer season opens. For 14 days, ordinary citizens will be able to do what government agencies refuse to do, try to reduce a deer population responsible for spreading ticks disease, property destruction, and hundreds of fatal car deer collisions each year. Yes. Hundreds of Americans die every year hitting deer with their cars.

[00:20:20] Hunters are the unpaid public health workforce, but instead of getting thanked, they get hassled by overeager conservation officers over paperwork, by legislators' banning, baiting because of optics and by communities outlawing hunting because it upsets the kids. If you live in the suburbs, you should be encouraging bow hunting.

[00:20:44] You should be sending your son into his tree fort with a bow and arrow. With the ecology of fear, he wouldn't even need to shoot a deer every year. They'd just learn to stay away. But here's what happens instead. About 20 years ago, one park in the Detroit area had so many deer, they publicly asked hunters to come cull them.

[00:21:07] But because it was a public announcement, protestors showed up and drove the deer away and heckled the hunters. It's like calling volunteer firefighters then having activists chase them away while the building burns because they think bonfires are pretty.

[00:21:25] Well, the county government still does the same thing today, except they have to quietly hire paid professional sharp shooters. And it's harder to protest because they don't announce it. And the sharp shooters could do things like using night vision, which the hunters cannot. And the same liberals who do show up to protest are too ignorant to connect the deer with ticks, disease and the high cost of healthcare and car insurance. Because ticks are not political.

[00:21:57] Deer don't care and nature doesn't care.

[00:22:03] This poor man in New Jersey, he didn't die because the climate warmed a degree. He died because we subsidized deer overpopulation. We politicized hunting. We romanticize wildlife and we ignore biology. No one has to hate deer. Every creature has its place in nature, even the pigeon and the rat. But all nature should be enjoyed in its place.

[00:22:35] We need to start treating deer like we do the rest of nature, not as lawn ornaments. But as the attractive yet dirty vectors of disease that they truly are. Thank you for listening.