I hate 'em. I spent the weekend in the woods, and slew three this evening in a nail-polish-based counteroffensive. I suppose that my loathing for them is no more justified than a cow's loathing for me would be (if a cow could gin up an emotion as sophisticated as loathing), but I just hate them.
A mosquito does her business and flits off; a horsefly stalks you, feasts, and buzzes off in low-speed triumph, but the tick - the tick moves in, determined to get intimate and set up housekeeping on your person. I suppose it's the presumption that aggravates me and makes it personal.
When I swat a mosquito, I give it scarcely a thought; when I crush a meaty porcine horsefly or yellowfly I briefly snarl "You lose," like a bad hombre in a cheap western. But when I paint and suffocate a tick, I wallow in the thought of her abdominal gasps; I laugh out loud at the imagined supplications she sends up to her two-synapse exoskeletal god; I relish the thought of her death and leer at her lifeless extracted body with the guilty enthusiasm of a trans-species Dahmer surveying a tiny refrigerator full of victims.
I hate ticks.