Ep. 38: Shooting Giraffes with Paintballs and How to Avoid Ticks and the Diseases they Carry
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As a guide and hunter, I've spent thousands of days in the field. This show is about translating my hard-won experiences into tips and tactics that'll get you closer to your ultimate goal, success in the field. I'm Remy Warren. This is Cutting the Distance.

It's springtime. It's a great time of year to be outside and be recreating. After winter's worn off, hopefully some of these quarantine restrictions start lifting and we can get out and enjoy the outdoors.

There's so many awesome seasons to take advantage of this time of year. We've got turkey season, bear season, depending on where you live. It's also the start of many great fishing seasons, but overall, it's just a great time to be outside. However, there is one season this time of year that I do not like, and that's tick season. If I really think about it, ticks are probably one of the more dangerous things that a majority of hunters encounter just being out, especially in the spring.

It's because they're disease vectors for things like Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted tick fever, which can actually kill you, as well as a lot of other diseases that cause sickness and other complications. I mean, ticks can be a huge problem, but there are great methods and best practices for prevention.

Over the years I've developed a system that seems to work really well and just allows me to go into the woods with a lot more confidence. But before we get into that, I want to share a story that involves three things. Ticks, giraffes, and paintball guns.

When I'm thinking about tick stories, a lot of them came to mind. I was thinking originally about this bear hunt with my buddy Brett where we were pretty much fighting ticks off with machetes. And then another hunt where I decided to go spring bear hunting in Montana in shorts. And by the time I reached a couple miles into where I wanted, I'd counted over a hundred ticks in a region that I'd prefer never to see ticks again.

But of all the tick encounters and experiences, one completely stands out from the others, and it takes place in South Africa. Quite a few years back, I would pretty much try to find guiding work wherever I could, and I would travel around and kind of made it a year-round job going to New Zealand, traveling to different states, hunting spring seasons. And one year, I actually found some work in South Africa.

Just starting out, I was on this reserve that had a lot of animals, but in this particular reserve, they happened to have giraffes as well as, I mean, there's a lot of different species in this particular area. There was zebras, Inyala, Kudu, waterbuck, giraffes, some other just like smaller animals, duikers, and just a lot of different species.

Now, on this particular place, they did have a problem with tick-borne diseases killing a lot of the animals. And the giraffes were especially susceptible to this. I don't know if it was just their body size, but some of these animals, you would find so many ticks in their crotch region, in their armpits. It just looked like these massive growths growing, and they were all from ticks.

combination of disease from the ticks and then I think just so many ticks getting on these animals I mean I just I couldn't see how they could live on

And it was becoming a really big problem. So this particular place, while trying to help out a lot of the animal populations on this piece of property, hired hunters or professional hunters to inoculate the animals. And they use these, they call it douse. So it's like, it's a chemical that, you know, people use on cattle as well. It kills a lot of parasites and does kill the ticks as well. So they would use this douse to,

to inoculate and kill off the ticks to help these animals survive some of the tick-borne diseases and maybe just give them a better fighting chance.

Now, if you're running cattle or whatever, you can bring your cattle into the yards through a squeeze chute, spray a little douse on the backs of them and send them on their merry way and do that once a year and you'd be fine. However, it's pretty hard to round up wild animals like zebras, giraffes, inyala, water bucks, all these things that are extremely spooky living in the wild in the bush. That's just not possible.

So the delivery method for this douse was a paintball gun. And these paintballs were filled with the chemical that kills the ticks. And then hunters would, you know, myself, I would take the paintball gun around, try to sneak up on animals and shoot them with the paintballs to inoculate them from the tick disease.

And if you've ever shot a paintball gun, they don't go very far. It's like shooting. I would say it was probably like hunting. I would compare it to hunting with a traditional bow because you had to get pretty close to these animals to be effective or to make a good shot.

You could hit them anywhere because the oil from it would – I mean, it's strong enough that it could pretty much cure a larger cattle-sized animal with one or two paintballs. And some of the other animals like giraffes or real social animals that rub up against each other would actually spread it to each other as well. So you didn't have to make like a vital shot or anything, but you had to be pretty close –

and without obstructions of brush or anything else to actually hit these animals. So that's one of the reasons that they hired hunters. They're really good at stalking to get in and inoculate a variety of animals that were extremely spooked, had been hunted and pressured fairly hard and did not allow people to get very close.

I was also given a four-wheeler where I could drive around. So I was mostly on the four-wheeler. I would have the paintball gun. So if I was driving around and saw some, I could shoot them with the paintballs or even try to chase some of them down with the four-wheeler and shoot them. The trouble was there were not a lot of roads there and it wasn't like the type of terrain where you could drive off road and chase them and get them. So for the most part, it was spot and stalk and then a lot of night work with a spotlight and

especially for some of the more nocturnal animals like the bush bucks, the inyalas, just a lot of different animals at night. They're mostly concerned about getting the giraffes. And I thought, oh, okay, this is going to be super easy, shooting a giraffe with a paintball gun. I just had no real experience with giraffes at that point.

They were the hardest thing to sneak up on. And I think until this point, I'm not sure anybody had really shot the giraffes with paintballs. They're giant, but they can see forever. And they were extremely wary. They did not like people getting close. They were not like friendly zoo giraffes. They would see you from a long ways off and then they would just constantly keep jogging out of range of the paintballs.

So one of the first nights I would drive around and I don't know why, but I was never able to locate a giraffe at night. I just thought, oh, that'll be easy. I'll go find some giraffes at night. Maybe it was just like, you know, being unfamiliar with where they hung out. I didn't really know where I was and mostly just kind of sticking to the roads on the four-wheeler with the spotlight because it was one that plugged into the battery. I didn't have a cordless spotlight. So

I drove around all the roads that I could find kind of after I knew the area, spotlighting, shooting some of the more nocturnal animals with the paintballs, but not seeing any giraffes. So I ended up starting to figure out where the giraffes were hanging out. I had spotted some giraffes one morning after having quite a few failed stalks on them. I'm like, okay. Because at first I just thought I'll just walk up and shoot these things with the paintball. That'd be great. Yeah.

And that was not the case. So I let him calm down. I go stalking some other animals, inoculate a water buck, which was like a pretty cool stalk and hunt in some real thick stuff. And then I go back to where the giraffes were and they're feeding. I'm like, okay, cool.

So I start sneaking in and there's about five or six giraffes in this one spot. I'm like, all right, I'm trying to plan out my stock where I can get through this one little Creek where I can get close enough. And they're kind of feeding away like backs and really focused on eating this tree. So I'm like, all right, this might be my best chance. So I got to shoot as many of these things with the paint balls as I can.

I get close, I get lined up and I'm like, all right, sweet. I think there was five giraffes and I'm like, all right, I'm going to take these three close ones. And then as the other two come out, I might try to hit them on the run. So I get lined up. I shoot the first shot, hit the, the close giraffe in the butt with a paintball. And I tried, I'm trying to get maybe two paintballs on each giraffe before I moved to the next one. So the first one, I pop, pop,

Got him twice. The next one, pop, pop, got it. But at this point, they hear the gun going off. I'm fairly close and they don't like it. So they start running. I shoot the third one one time and now they're standing out at a distance, like looking there. They're not liking it. And I'm like, guys, I'm just trying to help you out here.

And then they start taking off again. I'm like, all right, I can get that one one more time. As I shoot that one, they run into a herd of zebras. I'm just like guessing my yardage, but these, I don't have a lot of these paintballs either. And I want to conserve them because I think they're kind of expensive. So I shoot and I'm thinking, okay, I will definitely hit this giant giraffe out in this flat. The paintball goes over the giraffe and hits a zebra behind it.

And I thought that was pretty awesome. How many people have tried to shoot a giraffe with a paintball, missed, and hit a zebra? I think that that's very low.

That was just one of the more fun experiences I've had dealing with ticks and just a crazy fun and interesting look at how bad the ticks affect the animals there. And I'm thinking, man, I do not want one of these ticks on me because I saw the damage that they did to large animals there.

and how devastating they were, and the fact that they needed people to come in here and help protect the animals by just trying to kill the ticks. Why are ticks so bad? Well, the answer is because they carry a lot of fairly bad diseases. Let's just actually talk about ticks a little bit first, and then we'll go into some of the preventions and things you should do to just make sure that these things don't happen to you.

The way a tick feeds is it essentially finds a host, buries in, and then draws blood. Now, ticks mostly transmit disease through their saliva glands. So when they bury into your skin, in exchange for taking blood, they're also releasing, most of the time, bad bacterias into your body that then cause complications or disease later on, or within a couple days to sometimes a month later. A

A lot of tick-borne illnesses are very hard for doctors to diagnose because they have similar symptoms, but some of them don't even manifest until a longer incubation time. So if you get bit by a tick, you might pull it out, not think anything, and then a month later get sick and not really correlate that with the tick. But let's talk about a few of the most common diseases that hunters or people get. The first one would be Lyme disease.

Now, some of the signs and symptoms of Lyme disease are fever, headache, fatigue. Lyme disease can manifest itself in lots of strange ways. I actually have a friend that got Lyme disease and it manifested as a form of meningitis where he had to have his brain essentially drained and spinal tapped for antibiotics to be administered.

I know quite a few people that actually have contracted Lyme disease and a lot of people that have had a lot of complications, long-term complications with nerve damage and other things from the bacterial infection years later. But one of the ways to identify Lyme disease, and this doesn't happen, it happens in about 70 to 80% of the cases, but it's a bullseye type skin rash that

I know people that have got Lyme disease that did not get the rash and then other people that have gotten the rash, but it was sort of hard to identify at first. So it's not so cut and dry, but the bullseye shape rash, especially after if you know you've been bit by a tick, seems to be one of the more dead giveaways for diagnosing Lyme disease.

Now, not all ticks carry Lyme disease. Lyme disease is carried by black-legged deer ticks. So the type of tick can actually help in identifying the type of disease. One disease that occurs very often where I hunt, and actually in many of the regions where I hunt, they have done studies on this disease, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.

It's called spotted fever because a lot of people within two to four days after they get the fever develop this really spotty looking rash. It's kind of like chicken pox looking, but more kind of everywhere, fairly fast. And it just, it looks, it turns your skin spotted.

But once you're that late in the disease, it can actually be a very debilitating, even deadly disease. It's been known to kill people. You can get a very high fever. Some of the symptoms include fevers, headaches, the rash, obviously, muscle pain. It can even lead to things like amputation, paralysis, permanent brain damage, just some seriously bad stuff. I just...

just secondhand known a guy that was in the back country in Montana. They, one of the guys got pretty sick. They're riding out and he just blacked out, fell off of his horse. His fever got so hot. He kind of passed out. They got him back in and it turned out to be Rocky mountain spotted fever. He had some paralysis issues, um,

He ended up recovering from it, but it was an extremely bad deal. Just within the seven days that he was in there, he almost didn't make it out alive.

And then there's one that I think is pretty scary is this alpha gall from the lone star tick, which is actually fairly more is being looked into it, but it causes you to be allergic to red meat. I've had some people that I know that have contracted this and hunters and now they can no longer eat meat, red meat, which I'm like, man, give me Lyme disease or Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Don't give me the one that you can't eat meat from.

The spotted tick fever mostly comes from the Rocky Mountain wood tick. And then I was reading recently a study out of Montana talking about Colorado tick fever, which

Spotted fever and Lyme disease are bacterial diseases. So it's a bacteria that gets in your bloodstream. But the Colorado tick fever, although it's not as dangerous as spotted tick fever, it's not deadly. It just makes you fairly sick, is a viral disease from the ticks. One study in actually an area that I hunt a lot was saying that one in five ticks were infected with this disease. And then of those ticks, about 1% contained Lyme.

spotted tick fever. And it is also very possible that you could be bit by one tick and be given multiple diseases. So with all that information, what we really want to do is not get bit by ticks.

there is a high likelihood that if you do get bit by a tick, you can contract some pretty bad stuff. So I think that the thing that we want to focus on is prevention. And so over the years, especially bear guiding, I mean, I've had a lot of run-ins, a lot of different experiences with ticks, and especially where I guided in Montana being a study area for Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

I knew that having talked to researchers and things, they're like, yeah, there's a lot of it here. You should be really careful. And I didn't take it very seriously at first, but over the years, seeing people that I know get Lyme disease, seeing people that I know get some other just really strange diseases from ticks, it really got me thinking about trying not to get bit and coming up with some best practices and some prevention techniques and just sticking to them.

in order to prevent from even having to deal with the initial bite of the tick. And over the last, I would say, four to five years, I've been really successful deferring ticks and not having as many. Some years I would go and have as many as 20 plus ticks buried in me. Now, if I get a single tick buried in a season, that's abnormal.

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Go to fishingbooker.com today. That's fishingbooker.com. Let's go into a few ways of prevention. I want to break this down into two, what I would call prevention and then best practices. So what prevention is, is just ways to prevent the ticks from getting on you, things you can do to hinder ticks from affecting you. And then the best practices, what I would consider is just like...

doing the way you do things to prevent them from getting to you. So kind of following a certain order of things, following a good code of this is what I do, this is how I, this is my measures for preventing tics, and then I follow those measures every time. And by just being consistent with it, it prevents it. When we're talking prevention, I think step one is to coat your gear.

A few years back, I started coating my gear in permethrin, and I think that that is probably the single biggest factor in preventing ticks that I've found. It is extremely effective, and I've noticed a huge difference when I use it. So what permethrin is, it's actually, I guess, like a...

We'll just call it a bug spray deterrent. But it's not like you would spray it on your skin. It is pretty potent. And so I just coat my gear with it, allow it to dry, and then use that gear when I'm out hunting.

The stuff that I've been using lately is from a company called Sawyer and they've just got like spray permethrin. You can buy it at REI. You can buy it online. You can buy it wherever. And there's other companies that make it as well. For what it is advertised, it lasts for six weeks or six washings, which is plenty of time. And I actually recode it probably every other week or something like that.

But what you do is you, you lay your clothes out, you spray it with this permethrin, and then you just hang it and allow it to dry. I do the outside and the inside of whatever my hunting gear is. Now I know if you're a bear hunter or a hunter, you're mostly, you're thinking like scent. Oh, I'm concerned about scent.

Here's my thought on that. First off, this doesn't really have a smell. If you think about the scent that deters animals, human scent is the scent that's triggering a predatorial response. Think about it like this. I know a lot of people are like, oh, well, if you're filling up your truck at a gas station, the deer are going to smell the gas because it's strong, which is true, but they're going to smell you as well because the wind direction and other things.

For a long time, I resisted using repellent or any kind of anything while I was out hunting because I thought, oh, that added scent is going to make a big difference and I'm not going to be successful. And then I started using it and I've seen no difference or change in success. It's better to have something to prevent ticks because that's a real and present danger than to think that whatever I'm using as far as repellent is going to mess up my chances.

And I think that if you try it, you'll find that it probably doesn't really affect your success anyways, but does affect the success of deterring ticks or even other bugs. Like the nice thing about this is it also repels mosquitoes, whether you're bait hunting or turkey hunting or bear. It doesn't really matter what you're doing outdoors fishing. You're probably going to encounter a lot of mosquitoes as well. And so to have something on your clothing that repels mosquitoes as well as ticks. Sweet. Awesome. I'm all for it.

The nice thing about this too is it depends on how fresh it is or whatever. It does repel ticks, but also if they start to get in the clothing, it can actually kill the ticks as well. You're probably thinking, well, that sounds very dangerous for me. I've read as many papers as I can to just research the dangers to people. If you spray it on like that, let it dry. It doesn't soak into our skin's too thick for it to soak into and have negative effects.

So I just suggest it. It's worth doing. And you can do a lot of different gear with it as well. So it depends on the type of hunt I'm doing. If I'm just going out from my house or cabin, whatever, coming back each day, just hanging out in the springtime all

I'll mostly just spray my clothes, but if I'm doing like a backcountry hunt, spring bear hunt or something like that, I'll spray my tent. And then you can even spray your sleeping bag as well. You just spray it, hang it out to dry, and you're good to go. It's awesome to be able to spray your gear and even think about, depending on what kind of seat covers you have or whatever, spraying your truck because...

A lot of the tick bites that I do get every year aren't from actually being in the field. It's from having my backpack in the truck and then ticks getting off that in the truck. And then a few days later when I've got no type of repellent on, tick crawling on me and bearing in when I'm not looking for them. When you're looking for them and being vigilant, that's when it's easy to detect them. It's easy to find them. You're constantly thinking about them. But it's the ones that are hiding out later on in your house and your vehicle.

vehicle that you aren't really paying attention to that gets you. So the next step is after I've applied the permethrin, then when I'm out in the field, my goal is to just stop access. So the way ticks work is they don't jump, they don't fly. They're just standing on blades of grass, mostly hip high or waist, like knee high with their fingers out or whatever out. Um,

and just waiting till you brush past them then they latch on once they latch on then their goal is to find a place a nice cozy place to burrow in so they're gonna probably either crawl up your pants if they're low on the grass they'll crawl up your boots up your pant leg if they're up above they'll crawl up your shirt or up your sleeve and they try to find somewhere

where they kind of are tucked in and unnoticeable, I find that they mostly burrow in or they just, they keep crawling up till they stop. So it might be at your waistband. It might be your crotch and your armpits or at the top of your head and your hair, somewhere where it's harder to find them, but also where they kind of crawl and stop and find a good place to latch. Or if you've got like a backpack on, I notice on my chest, sometimes I'll get them burrowed in right where my pack straps are. So yeah,

the way to stop the access is just allow fewer places for them to be able to crawl to your skin. What I do is I always tuck my pants. If I'm wearing tall boots, I'll tuck my pants into my boot and then lace my boots up. If I'm wearing shorter boots, I'll actually tuck my pants into my socks. Now, I don't like hiking around like that because there's a lot of things wrong with it. First, you get a lot of stickers in your socks because they're outside your low boot. And second, a

A lot of time when I'm hunting in the spring, it might be damp, who knows, like the grass from dew in the morning, some wet, and then that just drains all the water down my boot. So I'll tuck my pant in my boot or my sock, and then I'll just throw a gaiter over the top of that, like a shorter gaiter. Even though it can be a little bit warmer, it just prevents water from getting into my boot and also kind of keeps another added layer of protection from anything crawling up my pant leg.

My shirt, I tuck into my pants and wear a belt. It just helps keep everything sealed off. I like to wear a long sleeve shirt. It kind of keeps the sun off me. Plus, just adds a little bit extra layer of protection from the ticks. Then the third thing that I do is I will then spray the openings around my neck and wrist with some kind of repellent.

I prefer DEET. There's a lot of different repellents out there. I know it kind of sucks when you're on like a long trip or a long hunt and you're using DEET all the time. So I try to just limit it to I'll spray my hair or my neck area, just whatever. And then just around where maybe they might crawl up my sleeves by adding the permethrin, by tucking in my pants and then just doing the spray on those few areas, um,

it pretty much eliminates most of the ticks that will get on me. Now, there are the occasional ticks that'll land on you briefly or whatever, or be on your gear and other things. So I try to spray most of my gear down, but that has been probably the best system that I've found for just keeping ticks off in general. Now, as far as the best practices go, I like to break it into what I think of as the quarantine and the check phase.

Everybody now is aware of quarantine. Now, I'm not thinking about quarantining yourself, but if you think about it, if you're going out for a turkey hunt, you're going out for the day and then you come home, even with the repellent on and everything, sometimes there's ticks that have landed in something or just they're on your gear, they're on you, whatever. It still happens.

It's not 100% that they won't touch you. It just helps take away, say, maybe 90% of the ticks. So there is still a chance that there will be ticks on in your boots, on your clothing, whatever. Then you walk into your house, you take your clothes off, you shower.

But maybe some of those ticks are now inside your house. And that's when you don't have any repellent. You might have your kids, your dogs, your whatever. You aren't paying attention. You might go to bed after showering and pick that tick up at some other point when you're thinking about it. And that tends to be the ticks that ended up getting buried, buried into you.

So when I get home or if I'm camping in my tent, I don't bring my clothes into my tent. And if I'm, when I get home, I just have a black contractor trash bag that I keep handy. I take my clothes off before I go inside. If I'm in the garage or whatever, I take my clothes off. I put them in the bag. I mean, just like, you don't have to be walking around outside in your neighborhood, but naked, but I'm just saying like,

Have a way of taking the dirty clothes that you were out in the field with, putting them in a plastic bag to prevent the spread of ticks getting into your hamper, getting into whatever.

If I'm home, what I'll do is I'll then take those clothes and I'll just throw them in the dryer, you know, from the bag straight into the dryer and then turn the dryer on high for about 10 minutes. Dry heat kills ticks really well. And so that method kills them. If your clothes need to be washed beforehand, so ticks can actually live submerged underwater. So if you just put it in the washing machine, that's not going to kill them. And it has potential to get on your other clothes or whatever, but

I figured this out because I did a load of laundry and then pulled my clothes out and there's live ticks in there. And I thought that sucks. I always thought that water killed the ticks. And then I'm like, I got to look this up. Turns out it doesn't, but the dry heat does. So if you maybe aren't going to wash your clothes, but you just, you're coming in for the daytime, maybe you did a morning hunt or you're going to go do an evening hunt, just you're

Do yourself a favor, take those clothes from the bag, throw them in the dryer, kill whatever ticks might be in there. And then you've got, you know, tick free clothes from that point on. Now, if you're out in the back country or camping, it's not possible to do that. What I do is if I'm coming in, if I'm hunting a morning or something, I'll take my clothes. I've got maybe if I'm just like car camping, I'll have a black trash bag that I put the clothes that I'm hunting in.

in that bag. And I'll just try to squeeze the air out, tie it up, and then lay it out in the sun. I have had it, especially if your clothes are sprayed down with the permethrin, I've found like I'll open the bag up and there'll be dead ticks in there. Now I've also opened the bag up and seen live ticks, but I think that that combination of the hot, the sun, and the repellent

tend to get the ticks off the clothes. And then if I'm going to hang out and camp for the day, I'll do that for a little bit, let it sit in the sun, and then I'll take the clothes out and just hang them up because the ticks will leave a little bit away from where I'm camping or sleeping. But I try not to bring my

clothes from whatever ticks into my tent because I find that most of the ticks that I find on myself personally with this whole method buried in is in the morning. So after I've done a tick check and all that, so it's coming in from clothes or other things that you just have laying around. So if you follow this quarantining the clothes that you're using out in the field, then you're going to have a lot fewer instances of ticks latching on in random places like in your house.

Now the other best practice is checking. So you just got to constantly check for ticks. You know, if you're hunting from home or just recreating and then coming home, you know, take your clothes off, put them in the dryer, take a shower, rinse off, check yourself for ticks. If you're out in the back country, it's good to always just keep checking. I always call it, is your mind playing ticks on you? When you're out there, you're sitting, you're glassing, you're constantly feeling ticks crawling around. Once you find one, you kind of ever, you start feeling them all the time, but

getting used to knowing what it feels like, paying attention to that, checking. And then when you get back to your tent every day, you know, separating your clothes out, make sure there's no ticks on you, then go to bed.

If a tick does happen to burrow in, there's so many, I mean, I remember people saying, oh, you hold a match to its butt and let it back out or you put alcohol on it. And they're just like all kinds of ways to remove ticks. The only way you should ever remove ticks, I don't care what people have told you, do not do any other method than pulling the tick out.

Tweezers work fine for this. So what you want to do is you want to get as close to the skin as possible, pinch it with a pair of tweezers, not so hard that it squeezes it, but just hard enough where you can grasp it and then just pull straight out like you were pulling a splinter out of your leg or pulling a hair out of something. Like just firmly grab it and pull it straight out. And by doing that, you know, you want it to pull everything that it has out. Hopefully you've caught it before it's got too deep.

because most of the disease is through their saliva, it can still be transferred fairly quickly. But for the most part, you'll pull it out, you'll see, okay, does it have all of its attachments? And then take that tick, let's just say for this instance, put it in a plastic baggie because we're going to do something with it in a minute. But once you pull that tick out, make sure that there's no other pieces left in. If it's buried real deep, people can pull and leave some of the

the mouth in the hole, but it's pretty easy to tell whether you got the whole thing or not. And then once that happens, take some antiseptic, whatever you've got, like alcohol or iodine, some kind of first aid antiseptic, and make sure you clean out that wound because most of the diseases are bacterial. So then you clean that out and it will help if there was something there before it spreads. Just cleaning it out that way is a great, great thing to do.

Now, the last thing that I'll do, if I did pull a tick that was buried out, I'll often take a picture of it because certain ticks are more likely for certain diseases. So if you got a tick and you're like, oh, it was buried in and you're worried about Lyme disease, but it's a lone star tick, well, you probably won't have Lyme disease. But there are other diseases that those ticks can carry that might have similar symptoms. So being able to identify the type of tick, if you do end up getting sick later on, can be a

a huge help for the doctors diagnosing which antibiotics to give you or potentially what you might have because being able to get those antibiotics soon and be treated right away is just going to be way better in the long run. It's going to make your life a lot easier and it'll be more accurate in diagnosing potentially what you got.

One last thing to think about if you're going to be going into the backcountry, just remember to have some tweezers and antiseptic on hand if you do happen to get bit. Another thing that I would suggest is everybody in your hunting group or your family, whatever, follow these same best practices because...

The best way to prevent getting Lyme disease is just prevent getting bit in the first place. And it's super easy to do by just following a few steps, by being diligent about controlling ticks, and you shouldn't have any problems. You'll be able to enjoy the spring and be tick-free. I hope that helps some people. Ticks are something you should worry about, but if you just follow a few simple things, you can worry a little bit less and enjoy the experience a lot more.

Before we go, I figured I'd just mention some upcoming application deadlines. We've got a Kansas deadline, April 24th, I think.

And then Kentucky as well, if you apply for elk or anything there. And Idaho, the moose, sheep, goat applications due end of April, May, beginning of May, Montana, moose, sheep, goat is due. And then May 4th, Nevada deadline. So if those were something on your list of hunts, time is now. Also, I got a lot of questions asking about, they remembered I did something about applying in other states. That was episode 23.

So I know it's kind of hard to find because the way it's labeled doesn't really describe it. So a lot of people have listened to it. We're going to go back and re-listen. I got a lot of those this week. So that is, I'm pretty sure it's episode 23. Also, a question came in from Steve. He says, hey, Remy, heard you're going to talk about tick protection next week. Will that also cover mosquitoes?

Yeah. The same chemicals that deter mosquitoes also work with ticks, DEET, the permethrin, other things. So all this stuff is applicable for mosquitoes as well, which is a huge problem in the spring.

I know the Thermocell, I've used one in South America a while back and it was an older, I mean, this is like a long time ago and it worked pretty well. I know a lot of guys use those. That's not really good for tick prevention, but does work for mosquitoes, especially if you're stationary, sitting like in a blind or maybe a tree stand, something like that.

But yeah, so hope that helps everyone out. Also, we're going to be doing a Q&A coming up. So make sure to shoot your questions over. I've got a lot compiled. Some of them might not get to might have to push them to the next one. But if you've got any questions right now, shoot them over because that's it'll either be it'll probably be the first of May. But maybe I'll just decide to do it for next week. So shoot those questions over and we'll get those answered.

Until next week, don't let your mind play ticks on you. Catch you later. Hey, we're going to take a little break here and talk about interstate batteries. Now, if you're like me, enjoying the great outdoors, you need gear that is as reliable as it gets. That's why I power my adventures with interstate batteries. I use interstate batteries in my boats. I use interstate batteries in my camper. Great for your truck, too. From Alaska to Montana, they're outrageously dependable.

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