Then vast tracts of forest gave way to farms, and with hunting unregulated, the white-tailed population plummeted to fewer than 300,000. Ticks in the first half of the 20th century were not a problem. But as farmland was reforested, human sprawl eliminated natural predators and increased edible vegetation. Milder winters let more fawns survive to adulthood. As a result, white-tailed populations have exploded back to around 30 million.

In response, the idea of mass deer slaughter has been revived. In 2014, the Department of Agriculture and the Long Island Farm Bureau announced a plan to kill as many as 9,000 deer. In a government-sanctioned cull, typically done at night when people are scarce and deer are active, a sharpshooter can do things sometimes forbidden in recreational hunting, like putting out corn as bait and outfitting a rifle with a suppressor, so killing one deer doesn’t alert its peers. A participating sharpshooter later described in a blog post “the devastation” of the disintegrating bullets he used, “often turning the entire skull into jelly.” Afterward, men in Tyvek suits field-dressed the animals; the venison went to food pantries.

But decimating a local herd is a very tall order. Outside of islands and peninsulas, most places have unpredictably dynamic deer populations — for every deer you kill or sterilize, another might arrive from elsewhere. Sterilization is expensive, labor-intensive and unpopular. Increasingly, deer are in densely populated places where hunting isn’t allowed. And the politics of killing deer — our Bambis, our Rudolphs — are more daunting still.

In Long Island’s planned Deer Massacre of 2014, for instance, only 192 deer were killed in the end, after pushback that included, just in East Hampton, a petition, a rally and lawsuits. A year later, the town paid a contractor $190,000 to sterilize more than 200 does and bucks, only to abandon the experiment amid complaints about taxes and animal cruelty and a lawsuit from a wildlife-advocacy group.

The surge in lone star ticks, an ominous development in virtually all respects, has nonetheless awakened, among battle-scarred veterans of the deer wars, hope of ending the stalemate. “That becomes a game changer,” says Tony DeNicola, a wildlife ecologist in Connecticut who founded White Buffalo, the nonprofit that the Village of East Hampton hired to sterilize its deer 12 years ago. “You get arthritic symptoms or Lyme disease — that sucks for you. But you might end up dead? The political conversation has really changed.” (It’s worth noting that an alpha-gal allergy can, in many cases, eventually fade, if a victim steers clear of meat for a while.)