Photo by Erik Karits on Unsplash

We are Lyme-Disease-Carrying Deer Ticks and We Are Not Fucking Around

Our message is bigger than all of you

Kris Willcox
4 min readFeb 2, 2023

--

As a human who is alive, you probably think you know all about the work and mission of Lyme-Disease-Carrying Deer Ticks, but we are here to tell you that your human-centric assumptions are wrong, starting with the whole “parasite with no purpose” paradigm.

Yes, ticks have wasted the last 100 million years thizzing on mammalian blood, and keeping deer populations in check, but it’s 2023. Times, and parasitic relationships, have changed. Lyme-Disease-Carrying Deer Ticks — or “Lymies” as we’re known in the ‘hood Arthropoda — are a purpose-driven community of intentional disrupters. Antifa, Ixodes scapularis division, if you will.

Lymies are mobilized around the idea that if we, as blood-eating parasites, want to address the climate crisis, then we must leverage our superpower, which is making human beings really, really sick. We’ve been on the tick scene for 1,000 years, but our revolutionary work coalesced during the unforgettable summer of 1975 in Lyme, Connecticut, and accelerated in 2012, when the CDC recognized us (finally!) as an infectious disease powerhouse.

This spring — a season usually dedicated to feasting and massive amounts of tick sex — several trillion of us attended an activist training and improv workshop, where we forged a new alliance: Ticks for Climate Action and Continental Anarchy (T-CaCa).

Key point: while we identify as anarchists, we aren’t crazy, or pointlessly cruel. We spread disease because our method is the message: You, Human Beings of Earth, are dying. All of you. Even if you don’t have Lyme Disease (yet). We’re just trying to get your attention before it’s too late. And we’ll do whatever it takes. We’ll hit your best and brightest — your Kathleen Hannas, Amy Tans, and Amy Shumers, plus 475,000 other Americans a year. We’ll even nab a George W. Bush, and a Bieber while we’re at it. We don’t care. Our message is bigger than all of you.

You won’t silence us with DEET repellent (although, FYI, it’s the only kind that works and when you spray that essential oil stuff at us, we shit ourselves laughing). And you can’t hide from us — we’re everywhere. In forests and fields, wetlands and scrublands. Some of us are (don’t freak out) in the waistband of your underwear. (JK). (Not).

Recently, we’ve heard some truly human bullshit about “selectively controlling” the deer tick population. Please. You can’t defend your own capital and you think you can cull us?

There’s also been trash talk about eliminating us through gene editing, to which we say: Kiss our anal grooves. Given how most of your large-scale projects have turned out — colonialism, microplastics, we could go on — you probably shouldn’t play around with tick eugenics. Just saying.

You’ve gone so far as targeting White-Tailed Deer (you call them “primary hosts,” we call them “allies”) with stealth birth control. Hear this now: The fact that you’ve cancelled reproductive freedom for your own kind does not give you license to come after other species’ autonomy. Bans off White-Tailed Deer bodies, motherfuckers.

There’s even a small, pathetic, contingent trying to defang our movement with “tick humor,” so we’d like to ask you jerks in particular: Do ticks amuse you? Does Lyme Disease make you laugh? Do you think fever, headache, and bullseye-patterned skin rashes are funny? Then stick around for the facial paralysis, crippling arthritis, and heart disease, wise guys.

For all the shade thrown at Lyme-Disease-Carrying Deer Ticks, there are groups out there with far more brutal methods. Like the Anaplasmosis-Carrying Deer Ticks, who will make your red blood cells explode from the inside. Trust us when we say you do not want to meet these guys.

Look, we get it: not all of you are blowing us off. We see you, in your SPF 100+ Panama hats and permethrin-treated cargo pants tucked into your black knee socks. You are not our target victims. (Sorry for making you dress like total dorks.)

Our message — though admittedly complex — is actually one of radical caring. We’ll be OK when Earth reaches the temperature of an over-microwaved Hot Pocket, because we’re way more adaptive and collaborative than humans. But we’re going to miss you guys when your own stupidity ends life as you know it. You’re actually kind of… adorable… in a scrotum frog/tardigrade/Russell Brand sort of way, and we’re sad to see you following each other off a cliff in mass suicide (which, by the way, lemmings don’t’ actually do) just when some of you are getting a clue.

We hope this message gives the human community food for thought (#tickwit).

In the meantime, we’ll spend the summer — another scorcher, thanks to you — infecting you by the hundreds of thousands. Not because it’s fun, easy, and delicious, but because it’s the right thing to do.

Smash the state, and have a nice day.

--

--