Ticks By: US Public Health Service From: Life Nature Library: The Forest 1961
You people get me. I fucking love exoparasites. They need to make a tick that's the size of a cat and only eats specially prepared blood bags.
Yes!!! I've been lunged at by a dog, knocked out by a watusi cow, stepped on by horses a billion times, and got permanent nerve damage from a guinea pig bite. I've been bitten by ticks too. I love them all. They're just following their nature. And sometimes they look cute while doing it, like these ticks who want uppies \(^-^)/
This is actually a fairly big question applicable to a whole lot of things! Given that many people say they'd rather mosquitoes disappear than just malaria disappear, that leeches transmit no diseases but are still feared, and that many creatures are hated who can't bother anyone at all, I think the threat of disease is often only a secondary factor in the perception of pestiferous fauna. Diseases are scarier, but they're invisible and aren't a guarantee, whereas the bitey creature is an immediate visible agitation, so that's what more people care about.
Our brains are seemingly just wired like that. It's the same reason it's so easy to put off a chore for future you to worry about, even knowing how much more stressful that's going to be. Same reason society would rather let environmental issues worsen later than take inconvenient steps to prevent them. Us big brain animals naturally feel the strongest about what we can currently see! Even if the thing we can see is smaller, it ends up taking priority by default and you often have to consciously fight against that.
I'm pretty sure there have been theories put forth that our brains had to adopt this once we were capable of understanding that we're all eventually going to die, otherwise we'd be so stressed about that we hypothetically couldn't even function. I forget if this is considered a wacky crackpot kind of theory so don't quote me.
