Nope, you don’t.

In southern new england US, walking 100 feet from my car to the door of my mom’s house you can reliably get a tick from close mowed grass. Granted the area is coastal wetlands, but the density of ticks is incomprehensible.

It is one of the reasons I moved away, ANYTHING you do outside you immediately have to take a thorough shower if it is in nature (wait what is the point of being outside without nature? I know). That means you have to compartmentalize your outdoor work/play so it only happens in one chunk that you can then decontaminate yourself from with a shower and tick check after.

Even still though, you can’t be perfect with it and if you have outdoor pets you are fucked too.

I am not joking, I have pulled countless ticks off me and gotten lyme disease several times along with everyone else I know from that area. You get very very very good at tick checking and mitigating ticks getting on you (at this point I know the feeling of a tick crawlng across my leg hair and can catch them just by the feeling of them crawling up my leg when I am lucky), but you just can’t be perfect.

If this sounds disgusting and ridiculous, yes, yes it is.

I am not talking about the ocassional tick, I am talking about EVERY time you go into the woods you come back COVERED in ticks. This isn’t hyperbole, they genuinely get this bad in certain areas especially in the vicinity of wetlands.